The Mysteries of Marcie Fleach:Chapter 1-The Cult of Crime
by Sketchpad
Summary: An evil hippy with hypnotic powers, and his criminal cult, are terrorizing and stealing Crystal Cove blind. Can Marcie harsh his evil mellow before he cleans out the town, or will she become the next victim to join his creepy cult of crime?
1. 1

What if the Velma that you pinned for so long...

_Wasn't your Velma?_

What if the friends you knew for so long...

_Weren't actually your friends?_

What if there were _two_ Scooby Gangs?

_One group, outsiders, and stranded… _

_The other, native to this new timeline? _

And if the outsiders staked their claim in this new world, in the face of personal histories _not_ their own...

_...Then what happened to the natives?_

That is the mystery, the challenge, that Marcie Fleach will have to accept, or Crystal Cove will fall a second time, and there will be no one, this time, to resurrect it...

Time Travel meets with Ancient Magic and collides with High Technology in this new 40-chapter series based on _Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated._

_The Mysteries of Marcie Fleach..._

_1~_

A startled Marcie Fleach flailed out of her bed, just in time for her rattled consciousness to perceive the alarm clock going off, one fine spring morning.

Running her hand reassuringly through her tangled mass of dark hair, she sighed nervously and turned to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Her eyes reflexively looked to the small, framed picture on the bureau, as she reached over to silence the clock.

As usual, the smiling face of Velma Dinkley, struck Marcie's heart with a well-whetted blade of bittersweet longing, and for the umpteenth time in as many days, she debated with herself on the matter of just putting the portrait in a drawer and hiding it from her memory, sparing herself the slow, self-inflicted torture of wondering where in the world she was today.

She took a look across the bedroom to her only means of communicating with Velma these days without incurring her father's wrath over long-distance phone bills, a laptop that sat on a thin-legged table.

Marcie also couldn't shake the odd vibe Velma always seemed to carry with her every day they had the chance to talk. A sense that Marcie could only describe as a feeling of..._offness_?

And something closer. A tension that followed her friend's voice whenever she would reminisce for the sake of conversation. Years of knowing Velma's moods had given her a sensitivity that rivaled ESP, so Marcie couldn't believe that she had misread the air around her friend as strange.

Just then, a dark pang replaced the bittersweet one that settled in her heart. It didn't help matters that Velma had ran off with her other circle of friends without preamble.

Velma was, she knew, a creature of varied interests, most intellectual, and some, not so, and Marcie had always accepted the fact that although they were as thick as thieves, they wouldn't always have the same interests that kept them so close. But amateur mystery-solving was an activity Marcie would have never thought would lead to a secret rivalry.

Admittedly, Velma had gotten her hooked on mysteries, early on, although they both ultimately saw it more as an entertaining, intellectual exercise, than as a need to bring truth to light and the guilty to justice.

Sadly, she realized that she had fallen into the trap of nostalgia. Like a reckless parasite, the dark pang squirmed in her again, and she sighed, resigning herself to the action of asking herself-was it jealousy on her part? If so, who was she more angry with? Velma for leaving her, or the rest of the gang for taking her away?

_The rest of the gang_…

_What a joke_, she thought, smirking bitterly. As if the gang had ever truly embraced her into the fold.

No, she decided. She would never be angry at Velma over this, their friendship was well-weathered. But it was a hard truth that she was only marginally part of the gang, her invitation based solely on her closeness with Velma, nothing more.

She knew she had nothing in common with any of the others. She enjoyed no appetite to rival Shaggy and Scooby's, no wealth or beauty-based social status, like Daphne's, and although her love of chemistry allowed her to learn about metallurgy, she had nowhere near as high an interest in mechanical engineering as Fred had exhibited. Whenever the five of them were together, Marcie had always felt like a sixth wheel.

A memory took hold of her and Marcie smiled wistfully for a moment, remembering that none of it had ever truly mattered, because, in the end, Velma always came to _her_, her best friend, to make sense of the day. To do homework together in each other's bedrooms. To sing the latest songs by The Hex Girls ad nauseum. To hang out and window shop in the mall. To commiserate their lives in school.

To just enjoy each other's time together.

Time they no longer had.

Marcie picked up the picture and instead of putting it away in the bureau, she looked at it sadly, and traced a thin finger along Velma's round, freckled cheek.

"Velma Dinkley, where are you?" Marcie asked the portrait. Then she slowly got up and prepared for school.

The gleaming, titanic complex was a celebration of modern technological architecture, standing vigil at the edge of town and towering proudly in the sun.

A green-tinted glass, steel and concrete vision of technology and progress, Creationex World Headquarters was the financial and civic pride of Crystal Cove. The small, Californian town's high-tech back stage pass into the world of twenty-first century globalization.

Marcie's class milled around the plaza outside, watching the fountains' water dance in the morning light, glancing dispassionately at employees in business suits or lab coats coming and going, and waiting for their science teacher to finish talking to the two scientists who were assigned to conduct the tour for today's field trip.

Marcie strained her neck trying to look up the immensity of the building's length before the window-reflected sunshine dazzled her into blinking. For as long as she could remember, she would daydream about working for the technology giant as an up-and-coming chemist with a breakthrough formula, a small town wunderkind that would single-handedly propel Creationex into legend, joining the ranks of Ford, DuPont or Harley-Davison.

She was brought out of her current daydream by the friendly tap from behind of the science teacher, Mr. Townsend, when word was sent that the company was ready to receive them.

"Are you okay, Marcie?" he asked softly, so as not to alert the other classmates. He had seen, firsthand, in class, the targeted teasing she would endure from them.

"Yeah. Sorry. I was just in my own head for a while."

"I only asked because I want you to enjoy yourself while we're here."

"I will, Mr. Townsend."

"Remember, I know how lonely you are since your friend left town, and I really appreciate how smart you are, but no playing Sherlock Holmes, and ticking everybody off, like last time, okay?"

"Yes, Mr. Townsend," Marcie droned respectfully as they caught up with the rest of the class and entered the building.

Marcie managed a small smile as the interior's air-conditioning chilled her skin. The lobby was magnificent, a vast, marbled, climate-controlled palace in and of itself. Looking up, she saw, hanging stately, like tapestries, were two banners, showing the proud faces of the company's husband-and-wife founder and co-owner.

So taken was she by the sheer opulence of just the lobby, that Marcie almost missed something that, upon further notice, slightly tarnished the image of the place.

An odor, very faint, but certain, tripped lightly in the cool air. It wasn't a fragrance, Marcie knew, but it was familiar enough that it spurred her curiosity, although she couldn't place it easily while the ventilation system hampered her.

The nearby conversation of two classmates, young, distaff clotheshorses, caught Marcie's attention momentarily.

Brenda, a pretty brunette, preened her hair and asked her friend, Kelly, a redhead, "You asked Rob out to this Saturday's rager?"

"I thought he might be free already, but I'll ask," Kelly said. "I hope his old man doesn't have him working in the shop this weekend."

"I just hope it's not gonna be another snooze fest like that birthday party we went to last month," Brenda complained.

Sensing a prime opportunity in the face of certain dismissal, Marcie, her attitude on gregarious autopilot, stepped into view and closed in on the two girls, grinning and as visually outgoing as her frumpy clothing could convey. She couldn't believe what she was doing.

"Y'know, I couldn't help overhearing that you wanted to liven up a party," she began her pitch. "You can't go wrong with the right set of chemicals. I can whip up a serious batch of black light and neon pigments that uses body heat to change colors with every emotion. I call them _Mood Hues_. You can use them when you guys are playing Truth or Dare, and find out if they're telling the truth when their colors change. It's great!"

The snide look on Brenda's face, however, was the figurative door slamming on Marcie's face.

"Forget it, Fleach. You're not gonna drag this party down in flames. Besides, don't they need you at your daddy's amusement park? Those churros aren't going to sell themselves."

"Yeah! Don't worry about it, _Hot Dog Water_," her partner said with a naughty smirk. "We'll have plenty of chemicals to work with at the party. Trust me." And with that, the two left her behind as they continued to plan for the weekend.

Dejected, Marcie mentally kicked herself. She knew it was foolish to try to schmooze her way into the social limelight like that. Without Velma around, she could feel the full, stifling weight of her loneliness crushing her daily, both at school and elsewhere.

"I never knew how dull this town was without V in it," Marcie said to herself weakly.

As the class was led to stand near the receptionist's desk, Marcie tried to shake her blues by studying a few security guards softly reporting into their small walkie-talkies and moving around the lobby's periphery with quiet purpose, obviously searching for something, or, more likely, someone.

Concerned with the general hub-bub surrounding them, Townsend again asked an employee if the tour was fine, or in danger of being stopped. This time, the receptionist, who seemed unconcerned, but answered him, regardless.

"Well, I shouldn't blab, but I heard a top-secret electronic device was just stolen from R&D, and security is looking for whoever stole it. Other than that, it should be okay to continue the field trip."

Visually satisfied, the teacher turned to see the two scientists he had talked to outside, approach him from nearby. The scientists, a man and a woman, then turned to the slightly apathetic class with bright, practiced smiles and addressed them.

"Hi there, kids. I'm Dr. Hood," introduced the man.

"And I'm Dr. Baker," introduced the woman. "Are you ready for your tour of Creationex World Headquarters?"

Except for Marcie and a smattering of like-minded classmates, a half-hearted affirmation bubbled from the crowd of uninterested teens, who already began to fidget and huff under their collective breath, wishing they were back in school, waiting for the last bell to ring.

Dr. Baker could hear the disinterest in the majority of the students, but smiled in spite of it. She was a professional and she wasn't going to let the nonintellectually curious among them ruin it for the others, one of whom was, unexpectedly, sidling off to the side to talk to the teacher in low tones.

"I have to go to the bathroom, Mr. Townsend," Marcie told him. "Can I be excused?"

"It's "May I"," he corrected her. "And yes, but hurry up. We'll be down the hall."

Marcie went down a cozy, side corridor lined with restrooms, as the class marched ahead and Dr. Baker recited her lines as co-tour guide.

"Creationex, as you probably surmised, is one of the biggest and greenest corporations in the world," she explained. "Founded by Richard Owens and co-owned with his wife, Cassidy, the company is one of the world leaders in energy research and new technologies."

They reached a corridor flanked on both sides with plaques, awards, dioramas of earlier buildings in the company's history, models of award-winning devices, and photos of Richard and Cassidy, posing with either Dr. Benton Quest, or with Jonas E. Spacely and Sidney Cogswell, competing founders of industrial parts and aerospace companies Spacely Space Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs.

"But don't think Creationex only deals in scientific endeavors. Oh, no!" Dr. Hood chimed in on cue. "Creationex also has interests in food production, with our patented Ecoponics system, which can grow food at a faster pace, and larger amounts, in almost half the time, and, of course, it's completely green. So, do you kids have any questions, so far?"

"Well, sir," Marcie said, returning from behind the crowd in a trot. "I'm interested in chemistry, and I heard that the Creationex Scholarship is coming up. I know competition will probably be brutal, but I was just wondering what Creationex is looking for in a chemist."

Ethan, a lean, sneering, freckle-faced classmate and school soccer player, brashly teased. "Figures Marcie would ask _that_ kind of question. I guess since Velma skipped town, you have to be twice the brainiac for the both of you."

Marcie gave him a frosty glance that barely hid the threat. "Shouldn't be that hard, Ethan. I'm already twice the _man_ you are."

The hall suddenly resounded with the jeers and hoots of the gratefully perked-up class before the teacher quieted them down.

Dr. Hood chuckled at the tableau and then addressed Marcie's inquiry.

"Well, that's an interesting question, young lady. If you _are _interested in a career in Creationex, just know that we got to where we are by only getting the brightest and the best talent out there. But I think my colleague, Dr. Baker, here, could tell you more about our chemicals division better than I could. I work in electronics."

Marcie's eyes widened at that faux pas. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were a chemist, because I kept smelling something on you earlier when you came near us."

"Oh? I hope it wasn't my aftershave," the scientist said jovially. "It _can _be a bit overpowering to the ladies."

Marcie sniffed the air, her face, no-nonsense, as she concentrated on the scent that was still haunting the halls like a apparition.

"No," she carefully analyzed. "Definitely not alcohol, fragrance, propylene glycol, menthol or BHT. It's…" She sniffed again. "An acid, definitely. Uh…hydrochloric? Watered down, I think. And something else…"

Everyone around Marcie focused in on this strange scene, wondering with some irritation as to what this girl was playing at, and why she, in their opinion, was grinding this already boring tour to a dead halt.

Marcie ignored them and softly inhaled again. "Whew! A heavier scent. Uh…" She leaned next to the man to gather one last confirming lungful, then looked at him suspiciously. "Knockout gas?"

Mr. Townsend was momentarily silent, busily trying to understand why Marcie's behavior took this turn, and mentally composing a report to give to her father afterwards.

"Not again," he finally said under his breath.

The classmates who were too shy to ever be sociable to Marcie, along with the students who _chose_ not to be, stood still in the moment that hung, either waiting to see what would happen next, or gleefully waiting to see the scientist verbally shoot the odd girl down for her insolence. In either case, they didn't have to wait long.

Dr. Hood blasted off through the startled crowd of teens, without a word, running hell-bent-for-leather back toward the lobby, his eyes, desperately locked onto the glass doors of the main entrance.

The throng of students and teacher stood clustered together, confused, and not wanting to have anything to do with the possibly dangerous man, as they watched him tear ass down the hall.

Some students were suddenly jostled out of the way by Marcie, who forced herself forward of the crowd and thrust her hand into her jacket.

In her thin hand, she pulled out a sealed vial of blue liquid and, reaching back, unapologetically threw it at the runner's feet.

The vial cracked open against the marble floor ahead of him. Freed from the vacuumed interior of the container, the cooling liquid splashed across the path of the not-so-good doctor, thickening in the exposed air and turning into a jagged ice block that swelled around his shoes when they made contact. He tripped and crashed hard on the polished floor.

He painfully tried to crawl past the receptionist's desk before two beefy guards wearing uniforms that heroically tried to fit their frames, scooped the man up, arm-in-arm, and stopped his progress.

Townsend, followed by the now entertained class, arrived back at the lobby in time to see the thief being searched and one of the guards producing a small device from the man's inner coat pocket, electronic in nature.

"What's going on?" asked Mr. Townsend.

One of the guards responded, nodding towards Marcie. "We got a tip from this student here to look out for a suspicious looking scientist. We didn't know what she meant until we saw this guy running towards the exit."

The teacher, annoyed, turned his attention to the girl in question. "I thought you said you had to go to the bathroom, Marcie."

Marcie's achievement in uncovering the crime couldn't shield her from her own culpability, and she sheepishly said, "Sorry I lied to you, sir, but after I heard the receptionist talking about the R&D theft, and then kept smelling that scent out in the lobby, I put two and two together. He's obviously an industrial spy."

Flushed with success, she fearlessly turned to the spy and asked boldly, "Out of curiosity, who do you work for? Steelco? Majestic Electronics?"

The spy shrugged and confessed. It seemed he had nowhere to go, anyway. "Steelco. It was a big score, too, and I would've gotten away clean, if it wasn't for you, you meddlesome brat."

Marcie's eyes open wide in happy surprise. She called out to her classmates proudly. "You hear that? He called me _meddlesome_!"

The guard who spoke, then said to his partner, "Okay, let's take James Bond here to holding."

He then turned to regard Marcie. "Thanks, little lady. You did really good."

Marcie's face exploded in a blush. "No problem, sir. Like my mom used to say, 'There's no mystery without the _che_mistry!'"

The guards, too blunt to make any sense of the bon mot, stared in blank silence at the now embarrassed girl. They then led the thief away.

"I'll be back," Mr. Townsend told his charge as he walked towards the receptionist's desk. "I'm going to call the school and tell them we're coming back now."

"Don't quit your day job, Nancy _Drool_," Brenda said in a snarky, deadpan critique. "You're still not crashing our party this weekend."

A large, huskily-built boy named Gary, a close friend of the spindly Ethan, peered at Marcie, as if studying a new species of insect, and asked, "How did you do all that? You can't be _that_ smart."

"Deductive reasoning," Marcie explained with slight annoyance, not eager for a lengthy conversation with a jock, which, she joked to herself, was truly a oxymoron. "For example, I can tell that you like Beatrice Cummings. A lot."

Gary's eyes opened slightly at the proclamation. He hadn't made that public knowledge in school yet, and wondered quickly how Marcie even knew the girl's name, let alone his attraction for her. Still, he played it off.

"Really, nerd-girl? How?" he scoffed.

Marcie assumed a casual pose and said, "Well, in History class, the other day, I saw you take a small photo of her out of your jacket pocket and slip it into your history book. I recognized her face because I would see her sometimes when she went to cheerleader practice. I guess she was more interesting than the Black Death of the 1400's, huh?"

"So?"

"Well, during class, when you asked to go to the bathroom, I noticed that you took the book with you, and when you came back, I noticed that you smelled nicer on the way _in_, than you did on the way _out_. Need I say more?"

Gary suddenly stood in the shadow of Marcie's smug and faux-innocent demeanor, attempting to figure out how she could have possibly known what he did outside the classroom. Every conceivable possibility, from the reasonable, to the far-fetched, blurred in a rage-fueled whirlwind in his mind.

Without another word, Gary, furious and blushing, reached out, grabbed a fistful of the front of Marcie's jacket and blouse, and lifted her with seeming ease, off her feet.

"That's it! Don't think I don't know your game, Fleach!" Gary railed, blasting some spittle on her face. "I know you want to show off how _smart_ you are to everybody, with that mystery solving crap you keep doing. But I also know that little hobby of yours is your way of getting back at us when you can't run to the teacher. You play Little Miss Detective, and then you throw our business back in our faces."

Marcie stared back at Gary, her demeanor, unperturbed and positively flippant. "Wow, brains _and_ brawn. You might just be a better detective than I am. Just wish you could've told me that _without_ letting me know what you had for breakfast." And with that, she wiped her face dry.

"I'm tired of you knowing everybody's business, you knowy nerd-it-all, uh, I mean, you nerdy know-it-all!" Gary said with a raised fist. "You won't need much to solve the _Case of the Busted Lip_. It was me, in the lobby, with the knuckle sandwich!"

Ethan's hand gently held Gary's arm.

"Take it easy, Mr. Boddy," Ethan joked. "The teacher'll see ya. Besides, you gonna let a girl get to you like that? She's a dweeb, a geek. Look around."

All around him, Gary saw the wide-eyed looks of the classmates focused completely on Marcie and him, either oblivious or apathetic to his bathroom secret, yet curious as to whether or not he would actually punch a teen-aged girl in the face.

"See?" Ethan reasoned. "They probably don't even know what Marcie was talking about. Don't waste your energy on her."

Still held by indecision, Gary glared at Marcie to gauge her reaction, hoping she was exhibiting the satisfactory amounts of fear, regret and contrition.

But she did and said nothing. She simply looked past him, with a calm, sad silence, waiting for the blow.

The uncomfortable stillness of the moment, the waiting to see if he'd strike her down, made his conscience burn in shame. If he, indeed, hit Marcie, he knew that he would pay a dear price in the end, scholastically, if not legally, for the satisfaction of his bruised ego.

Opening his fingers with a sneer, he let her drop back on her feet.

"Eh, you're lucky my buddy talked me outta smashing you," Gary said with sneering bravado. "Next time, I might not be so nice. C'mon, guys, let's go wait outside by the bus. This science crap makes me antsy."

"Tell you what, Marcie," Kelly said nastily as the teens filed out of the lobby. "Here's a mystery for you to solve. Why is it you'll _never get a life?_"

The laughter lingered in Marcie's mind long after the kids left. She ignored Townsend's quiet order to meet up with the others outside. She didn't care if they couldn't return to school, waiting for her.

She willed herself to stubbornly stand in place in the cold lobby. She would leave the building on her own terms. Her tears were her own, she decided, and she would expose them to no one.

But she was just too depressed to cry.


	2. 2

_2~_

A pleasant, if run-of-the-mill, amusement park, _Fleach's_ _Folly Factory _was an institution among Crystal Cove citizens and local tourists during the spring and summer months for many years, although it had been something much darker in its earlier incarnation.

_Creepy Spooky Terror Land_ was technically more theme park than amusement, and catered to aficionados of terror. Owner Winslow Fleach decided correctly that giving people what they wanted, big scares, in this case, was very profitable. But that was before the park's suffered its own dark times in the form of a jealous, bitter and selfish Marcie Fleach, who nearly destroyed the park with a villainy towards her father worthy of King Lear's Goneril.

Only with the dissolution of that timeline following the destruction of the Evil Entity by Mystery Incorporated, was the park, like Marcie, Crystal Cove, and the world, reborn into a new history.

Winslow Fleach, a thin, bespectacled man, settled deeper in his office chair as he listened to both the satisfying sound of tourists enjoying themselves outside the park's administration building, and the friendly sales pitch from the gentleman sitting in front of him.

"I have to admit, Mr. Greenman, I've never had the pleasure of being offered that much money for my park," Winslow said. "But, again, I must, respectfully, decline."

A tall Englishman with a slightly gaunt face, wide, studious eyes, a hooked nose, and hair that was styled in horn-like whorls, Mr. Greenman had the appearance of a humanoid owl, but didn't look at all that disappointed by the refusal. That was as much as Winslow caught from studying his guest, but it could have also meant that he just hid it well.

"Are you sure?" Greenman asked in a smooth English voice that spoke of old money. "I know it seems strange. Me, coming out of the blue, having just moved here, and just asking you, outright, to buy your company. But I confess that I've always had a fondness for entertaining people, and always wanted my own amusement park."

"Well, with the amount of money that you were going to give to me for mine, you could certainly set up your own park, Mr. Greenman. I certainly wouldn't mind some local competition." Winslow suggested amicably.

Greenman looked thoughtful at this, then said, "Yes, I _could_ do that. I suppose the only real issue, then, is location, location, location."

"Indeed. As the sunniest place on Earth, this town has land for miles, and getting permission to purchase and develop some this beautiful land should be a snap," Winslow reasoned, sounding more like someone from the Crystal Cove Chamber of Commerce, than the owner of Fleach's Folly Factory.

Greenman gave a conciliatory smile and stood, his height imposing, in his dark business suit. With Winslow standing after him, the two men shook hands.

"Thank you for taking the time to listen to my offer, Mr. Fleach." Greenman said with a grin. "Who knows? Maybe I'll take you up on your suggestion to start my own park. If so, I look forward to having you as a competitor."

"So do I, Mr. Greenman."

"Thank you. I'll see myself out."

Greenman smoothly stepped out of Fleach's office, and almost bumped into a lanky, brunette girl in striped leggings and dowdy clothes, who was approaching the office herself.

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir!" A startled Marcie apologized upon getting her bearings and seeing the man.

"That's quite alright, young lady," said Greenman, turning back towards the office door. "Are you heading for the office?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then allow me." He opened the door for her and stepped gallantly to the side to allow her to enter.

"Thank you, sir," Marcie said, impressed with the rare chivalry.

The door closed again and Greenman had the corridor to himself once more, as he walked back to the small elevator at its end. Just before he pushed the button to call up the car, he thought back to the girl in the frumpy clothes and striped stockings, and had...a peculiar feeling about her.

It ran around in his mind a few times, before he ultimately dismissed it a foolish notion. Then the car arrived and he stepped in.

Marcie flopped down in the comfortable chair in front of her father's oak desk, looking surly and feeling none too comfortable, after she handed him the two-page note her teacher had penned below the high school's letterhead.

Winslow sighed as he perused the letter, his brows either furrowing at something written that was negative, or rising upon something positive, but sighing through the read, all the same.

He lifted his eyes slightly above the level of his squarish glasses to peer at his daughter, in annoyance, and asked, "Again?"

"Y'know, we have to talk about these costumes, Dad," Marcie said innocently in an attempt to deflect the scolding that was sure to come.

"Marcie…" Winslow glowered at her insolence. This was a tactic she always fell back on, that was as old, he thought, as it was tiresome.

"Because they're just murder to wear, these days," she continued, trying to coolly ignore the rising octave in his voice.

"Marcie…"

"Can I bring it up at the next staff meeting?"

"_Marcia Anne Fleach!" _he barked.

Her eyes instantly studied the carpeted floor. Something in her regressed into a eight-year old girl whenever she heard her name spoken that way. It closed most windows of debate.

"I saved Creationex from scandal and a multi-million dollar theft, and _I'm_ the bad girl?" Marcie quickly protested in her defense. "Shows how under-appreciated I am. Plus, that teacher's a guy. He's just mad because I'm probably a better scientist than he is."

"Well, I don't care if you're the second coming of _Madam Currie_."

"Well, I don't want to toot my own horn, Dad," Marcie quipped immodestly. "But, _beeep_!"

"Your constant belief that you don't need help from any man, notwithstanding, he's still your teacher," he continued.

"What's your point?" she asked with a flippant sigh.

"The point is that you've been acting rather cavalier these last few weeks. Bringing your chemicals to school again, using deductive reasoning to taunt the kids in your class. Why? Only Heaven knows. And looking for scofflaws and ne'er-do-wells to trap in that insta-ice concoction of yours."

Marcie bristled as she settled in the cushioned chair, trying to ignore the dated speech that her father uttered so easily, and, like all teens before her, attempted to dismiss the scolding.

"First of all," she condescendingly informed him. "No one says scofflaw and/or ne'er-do-well anymore, and second, looking for said people has been rather intriguing to me as of late. What with Velma gone to who knows where…"

Noticing suddenly that she was backsliding into a funk that she didn't want her father to know about, she perked up theatrically, and continued her earlier line of thought.

"Mystery-solving has kinda been a great intellectual exercise for me. It's kept my thinking focused and my mind sharp. It's a win-win, Dad."

Winslow, however, was unimpressed with the mental benefits of amateur criminology. "Apparently not enough of a win for you to get in trouble with Mr. Townsend and Principal Jones." He rolled up his eyes in regret. "I knew we should have had you checked for MSS when you were little."

Marcie took that with a sly, mischievous smile. "C'mon, Dad. I don't have _Mad Scientists Syndrome_, as far as you know. Besides, Mom liked having another lab rat in the family."

"Where do you think you got a taste for test tubes from?" Winslow countered, perhaps too quickly.

Marcie looked at her father, slightly worried, even a bit wounded, as though a patriarchal betrayal was bubbling up to the surface. Didn't he love her, Bunsen burners, and all?

"Are you..._upset_ about that, Dad?"

Winslow could read the fear in his daughter's eyes and sighed again, this time at his own seeming insensitivity.

_If my foot could get in my mouth any faster, I could charge admission_, he thought darkly.

"No, honey," he soothed with sober conviction. "I'm extremely proud of the gifts you have, and your mother would have been proud of you, as well. But we don't need another visit from the men from the government, do we?"

"No," she agreed in a sulk.

"Good. You don't know how close I came to having to negotiate visitations rights for you, last time."

"_Ugh! _I was just making dry ice for show-and-tell," Marcie scoffed in exasperation. "You're telling me that they were prepared to arrest a six-year old?"

"They had a Miranda card written in crayon for just the occasion," her father deadpanned, then soothed, saying, "Listen, honey, I don't have to tell you how the world's changed these days. It won't be long before chemistry sets will be banned from toy stores, and they come to take your beakers away."

Marcie stiffened. "From my limp, lifeless hands!"

"Now, Marcie, this is no time to be political," Winslow said, feeling the subject drifting away from topic. "What are we going to do about this?"

"Well, I think we should write to our congressman-"

"About the_ letter_," Winslow patiently reminded her.

"Oh," she said, before jokingly raising her right hand up. "Uh, okay, I promise not to freeze any more criminals in oxygen-activated cryo-fluid?"

Winslow straightening his glasses sternly. "Not good enough, young lady. Come here." He then patted his lap.

Marcie stood up and stared at her father with sassy defiance, putting her hands on her hips. "Uh, I think I'm little old to be spanked, don't you?"

"You're never too old for that," Winslow said, without missing a beat. "But that's not what I mean. Sit here."

Marcie sighed, and for the sake of familial peace, she did as she was told.

"I'm too old to be sitting on your lap, too," she grumbled.

"You're never too old for that, either," he said, as he gestured to the photos on one side of the office. "Now, what do you see there?"

Marcie rolled her eyes up. "C'mon, Dad, please? I had my fill of tours today."

Winslow gestured to the photo of a well-dressed man in 1800's clothing. "This amusement park was the nineteenth century brainchild of our own Chester Adams Fleach, owner and proprietor of Fleach's Fine Franks, a local hot dog factory and eating establishment. He was blessed at being at the right place at the right time. Namely, setting up shop on land he won in a card game, at the side of a road that would serve as an artery leading into town, _and_ during a time when construction workers, arriving from Los Angeles, needed something to eat."

"_Ugh! _I'm bored! You've been telling me this story since I was six!" she whined.

"From that simple need," he continued proudly. "Came the impetus to invest into the business and bring it into the realm of entertainment. In time, the eatery became a full blown restaurant, the hot dog factory was converted into storage space to support the empty land that then became Fleach's Fields of Fun and Frolic, Crystal Cove's first and _only_ turn-of-the-century amusement park."

"Yeah, Dad, I know!" Marcie moaned in frustration. She wanted to bolt out of the office so badly.

"Years of competition, renovation and Fleach generational control has shaped the place into the fun, family-owned-and financial profitable business it is today."

Marcie slumped in mock-exhaustion. "Is it over? I think I preferred the spanking."

Winslow brightened, as he swiveled his chair to turn them around to view the other side of the office, where a model of a new ride sat on a long table.

"Just reminding you of your heritage, my dear. Now, I was saving this for the next staff meeting, but I'm preparing to have a new attraction built in the park for the summer crowds. A water slide! It'll be great. It's fast, it's fun, it's wet, and it's a money-maker. Now _that_, my dear, is a win-win!"

Marcie found herself perking up, interested in any good news for the park. "Do you know when will it be ready?"

"Well, the slide's already built, in a closed off area of the park. After the inspection crews finish their safety tests, they'll let us know if it's safe to use."

Impressed, Marcie stood up and hugged her father. "Well, congratulations, Dad. That water slide might just be _the_ big ticket item for your park."

"Marcie," her father lovingly chided, "It's your park, _too_. You may work here with me, but the park's pride is the family's pride, and the park's money is the family's money, and vice versa. On both of them."

Marcie smiled at that. She loved the inclusion, that feeling of belonging, even when the family business got on her nerves. Her father was always going to chase that elusive prize, to be the next Walt Disney, and she understood that, long ago.

She strolled up to the door and calmly opened it, while Winslow moved himself and his seat back up to the desk, to resume working.

Although the start was a bit rocky, she was feeling more at ease, glad to have had this chat with her father. The past few hours were so much easier to get handle on, now that the burden of all that emotional baggage was dumped by their feet through the simple act of talking.

"Where are you going?" Winslow asked her.

Marcie took a cocky glance towards him as she stepped past the threshold.

"To the mall," she said matter-of-factly. "To spend some of our family's money. I'll see you at home."

Conway, the _Orange Ya Glad _Eatery's sole employee on duty, wiped down the counter near his cash register, and thought blankly about his yellow and orange uniform.

He wanted to be a contestant on one of those reality show that took place on one of those far-off islands. He would have loved to run around shirtless, showing off his skinny arms and bird chest to the female contestants, just so they'd secretly scheme to be near him. And use his barely-managing-high school brain to come up with the deepest of machiavellian intrigues to confound the male players, demonstrating what a serious threat he was that season.

He smiled at that scenario, as he absently watched Marcie Fleach, half-drunk soda in her hands, walk out of his establishment (he knew it was a far cry from being called a 'restaurant'), in the Crystal Cove Mall's food court.

Leaning on the counter and looking out past the entranceway, Conway noticed a cute girl strolling past one of the indoor plant islands in the center of the mall's wide thoroughfare.

Taking the time to regard her attire, Conway tilted his head to the side slightly, like a puppy working something out in his head.

The girl, and in fact, the two other girls that he could now just see, were draped in flowing, iridescently-colored blouses, jeans, and sandals. With clicking, beaded necklaces, bangles and bracelets, and headbands to complete the ensemble, Conway wondered if they were from some 60's theater troupe that had gotten lost.

He shrugged as they went by, and then went to the register to count the afternoon till. He had seen prettier mallrats wearing worse.

Marcie sipped on her orange soda and scanned the display window of Star's Fashions. The midriff-bearing peasant's blouse begged to be bought, in her mind. Looking over at the sexily cut jeans nearby, and the other blouses and pants, tantalizingly hung like forbidden fruit, in the store's interior, Marcie began dreamily running combinations of various tops and bottoms together in both socially acceptable and deviously decadent styles, as though she were working out the elusive formula for the chemical known as Popularity.

Mentally assessing the amount of money she had with her, Marcie decided to check out the other stores before coming back and purchasing the peasant's blouse at Star's.

_I would have loved to have shown off the blouse to V_, she thought as she turned to see three boys cruise off from the traffic of the thoroughfare. She would have ignored them, except their mode of dress was strikingly dated.

Bell bottomed jeans, sandals, fringed leather vests on bare chests, headbands, bracelets and the odd medallion were hung on these teens as loosely as they would have on their parents, if they had worn similar.

Taking another sip, Marcie wondered if the mall was doing a live performance of the musical _Hair_ or _Godspell_, when the world around her disappeared in a blast of multi-colored smoke.

Bringing her shielding arm down from her face, she looked around through the thinning smoke and saw that she and everything in her vicinity wasn't damaged. She exhaled thankfully when she also saw that no one was hurt, only shaken by the theatrical entrance of the grinning, adult hippy, emerging from the haze like a spirit from the Summer of Love.

The predacious eyes under his rosy sunglasses took on the stunned patrons with satisfaction.

"Hey, everybody! I'm Ringleader," he called out, as he spread his arms open like a preacher and intoned with projected bravado. "And this is my colorful cult of crime! We're all about _free_ _love_! That is, we _love_ your valuables, so we'll _free _them from you!"

The hippy calmly held up his hand and gestured his two fingers into what would have been the traditional peace sign, except the ring finger was slightly bent, as if the peace sign was broken on one side.

Armed with this parody of a normally universally positive statement, Ringleader strangely grinned, when some of the people, already in a bad mood with the day, for whatever reason, responded by jeering and taunting him, completing their attacks by pelting him with the odd, empty soda cup and food carton.

So distracted, annoyed and _focused _were the patrons closest to him, that the six cult members who had already arrived, split into three groups of two, a boy and a girl, slipped quietly behind the occupied customers, and moved strategically into the entranceways of three nearby stores. Stores that happened to sell rather expensive electronics, jewelry and furs.

In each store, the female cultists went over to either the cashier on duty, or the manager, if he or she were present, while the male cultists stood in front of the entranceway and unfolded a large sack from a pocket in their trousers.

"What's going on, here?" asked the manager of the electronics store while he watched the hippy girl slowly approach.

The girl's eyes were so innocent, as to almost appear dreamy, and her face held not an inkling of ill intent, which made the attack all the more surprising, because the manager, and, indeed, the other targets of the cultists, had no clue as to what was transpiring.

The girls held up decidedly plastic looking flowers, as close to face level to their targets as possible without arousing suspicion. Behind the flower's head, however, was a concealed bulb that the girls surreptitiously held between thumb and forefinger.

"_Pieces_, brother!" the female cultist cheerily greeted with that same crooked peace sign that her master displayed.

Before the manager could utter a question, the thief pinched the bulb hard.

A focused blast of knockout powder coated the man's face, and in surprise, he inhaled reflexively, drawing enough of the tincture into his nostrils to have it be absorbed in his sinuses.

Lightheadedness came so sudden, that it startled the manager, but he didn't have to worry about the rest of the hour, for he, and the cashiers from the two other stores, collapsed onto the floor.

Unnoticed by the people outside, the cultists cleaned the stores of as much portable, and valuable, booty as their sacks could comfortably hold. Then the acolytes left the stores and waited by the entranceways for the next phase of their caper.

Ringleader risked a glance over the perturbed patrons and saw that his cultists were laden with booty and quietly awaiting his next command.

He turned his attention back to his zone of action, just in time to see three mall security officers cautiously, yet quickly, close in on him. He flexed his gloved fingers in preparation, while the folks he thoroughly distracted, decided to let the long arm of the mall handle him, and scattered fearfully, to give the officers a wide berth.

One mallcop, blackjack in hand, swung at his head with no preamble, hoping for a quick takedown. Ringleader caught the truncheon, ignoring the momentary pain of its impact, and reached over with his other gloved hand to grasp the exposed wrist of the officer's weapon hand, pouring raw voltage into his victim from hidden capacitors on his person.

The officer fell over, a twitching puppet of muscle spasm and disorientation.

His brothers-at-arms discarded safety, embraced anger, and rushed him with _their_ batons, eager to avenge, but making the mistake of thinking that their comrade was brought low by some martial art that this irritating throwback employed.

Ringleader quickly raised his arms into a "V", pointing at the two attacker. Crackling electricity flashed between both hands, creating a crude circuit, then lanced out to touch the two men, stopping them in a crashing, jerking heap.

Satisfied that no other officers were forthcoming, Ringleader turned to his cult members and saw that most of the patrons had left. Those curious few who remained, kept a cautious distance from him and his villainous flock.

"Are we ready to go, my children?" he asked, his back turned to the empty, flying cardboard box that then bounced lightly off of his head.

Clawing his fingers in readiness for another fight, he turned to see the box thrower, and instead gave a disheartening belly laugh in response.

Facing him was a young woman standing protectively in front of her nearby store, another empty box in her raised hand.

"Get out of here, you freak!" she yelled, more to keep her courage up, than to scare him off.

Smiling malevolently at her bravado, the heinous hippy shook a disapproving finger at her and pontificated.

"Hey, lady! Don't you know that violence is _not_ the answer?"

Marcie was wondering what to make of the exchange between the them, when Ringleader lazily raised his hand in the general direction of her store.

The entranceway exploded in a non-fiery, piebald blast, that swept the stunned proprietress across the floor, where she didn't move.

Marcie, realizing she was closer to the woman than anyone else, ran over and knelt, watchfully, by her, picking up one of her hands and gently patting the back of it to rouse her, forgetting for the moment that the criminal could attack her for simply offering aid. But the hippy had walked away, meeting up with his people and their swag.

"Thank you all for your generous contribution to our cause, Crystal Cove!" he crowed histrionically to any and all who would hear him. However, since everyone else had hightailed it when the brave woman's store detonated, Marcie was the only person conscious and close enough to listen.

"From me and my covetous cult, I say, 'Pieces!'" Once again, he held up his wayward parody of a peace sign, but this time he held something up in his other hand, as well. Something the other members of his cult also raised in their hands.

Marcie could just make out a small bead held in his fingers, and as their leader dashed his against the floor, the children smashed their spheres to the ground simultaneously.

The capsules shattered upon the tile, releasing thick, rainbow-colored smoke into the area, which spread and blended with the other clouds, making the mist denser and denser, until it was just shy of impenetrable.

To Marcie's failing perception, the criminal band became a gathering group of silhouettes in the heart of the smokescreen, and she quickly fought back the foolish notion of running into the haze to follow them, reminding herself that she had volunteered to stay with her charge. It soon became a moot point, however.

With a hearty laugh of victory, and a gust of wind from whatever point of escape the thieves had taken, the obscuring clouds parted and the cult of crime vanished in the wake of the mall's cacophonous security alarms and human confusion.


	3. 3

_3~_

Marcie settled into a more comfortably prone position in her bed while she straightened her laptop's angle to remove the late afternoon sun's glare from its monitor, and to better face its webcam.

"I don't know, V," she fretted. "This isn't like the old _Young Detective™ _mystery board games we used to play when we were little. This was serious."

Velma, sitting in her customary spot in the rear of the cruising _Mystery Machine_, looked at her laptop with a puzzled expression, and promptly forgot the timeline change, once again. "We played mystery board games together?"

Marcie gave a chuckle that tried to mask her dismay at yet another worrying gap in her friend's recollection. "C'mon, V, you don't have to make me laugh to cheer me up. I'll just pass on what I know to Sheriff Stone, and let him deal with it."

The mentioning of Sheriff Bronson Stone's name jarred Velma into remembering his erstwhile ineptitude. Chances were better than good that his bungling _could_ transcend time itself.

"Well...that would be the right thing to do," she counseled. "But, if it looks like he doesn't believe you, and chances are, he probably won't, then I'd say, maybe _you_ should solve this mystery yourself, Marcie."

That unexpected line of reasoning stunned Marcie. "Really, V? You really think so?"

"Well, we're out here on the road. _Someone_ has to look after Crystal Cove while we're away. You can just gather evidence, and when you think you've solved this thing, just give your findings to Mayor Nettles. I think she has a better head on her shoulders than her hubby. I just didn't think anything would happen so soon after we...uh, we left."

"But, _V_, I already have so much to _do_," Marcie explained, allowing the weight of the other parts of her life to settle heavily upon her. "I've still got school, and then I have to enter the Tri-State Olympiad of Science _without_ my favorite partner, and my driver's exam is coming up, and you know I have to help my dad with the amusement park, and, oh, yeah, I want to start checking out some colleges, too, even though I just _know_ Dad's going to want me to go to Darrow because _he's_ a Darrow man, and-"

Velma mercifully cut her off. "Marcie! Throttle down, will ya? Relax. You're one of the smartest girls I know. Obviously, I'm _smarter_, but…"

"Ah, Velma Dinkley, you're just as modest as ever," Marcie joked.

"Just kidding. But listen to me. I know you can do this. As big a whodunit freak as _I_ am, I should know. Like you said, it's just like those mystery games we used to play, just more serious. So, you treat it the same way."

Marcie smiled grimly. "I suppose. Wow, V, I didn't know you were _that_ into mystery solving. We just used to do it because it was a fun way to keep sharp. Still, I wish you were here with me while I was doing this."

Velma gave Marcie a wistful smile in return. "Yeah. It would be nice going mano-a-mano on this case with you."

"Well, it'll be alright," Marcie said. "I'll just follow the _Young Detectives' Credo _from the games. 'Open eyes, open ears, open minds and…'"

Velma wondered why Marcie would suddenly break off from speaking, until she looked into her friend's eyes and saw the expectation of remembering another memory Velma had no clue of having.

Seeing the now familiar, uneasy gaze on Velma's face, Marcie quietly finished the credo. "'Open hearts.'"

"Well, that goes without saying," Velma nervously commented, trying to change the subject slightly. "Now, you go out there and show them what your made of, Marcie Fleach."

She then soberly placed a finger along the image of Marcie's cheek. "But, be careful. No mystery's worth losing my best friend over."

Marcie put aside the nagging questions concerning Velma's off behavior, in favor of this quiet moment, likewise, placing a finger on Velma's freckled cheek.

"Don't worry, Velma, I'll make sure Crystal Cove is still standing when you get back."

Velma smiled again, but some deep sadness still managed to bleed through it. "I know you will. Oops, gotta go! Fred just told us that we're coming up on Utah. Tell my parental units that I love them, and if you have the time, check out Miskatonic University. I hear they have a wicked chemistry course."

Marcie brightened at that. "That good, huh?"

"It's _killer_. 'Til next time." Then Velma cut the connection and gently closed the computer. She sat there quietly, head bowed, for several minutes, wishing she could lose her guilty conscience, like the van lost the long miles behind them.

Beside her, Shaggy had listened to her conversation and glanced at her, while he softly scratched behind a sleeping Scooby-Doo's ear. His time as her old boyfriend gave him the perception needed to catch and recognize her in her happiest moods, as well as her most sour and remorseful ones. Such as what he was seeing now.

"Like, I don't know why you told her that," he said quietly. "I know she's your friend, but, like, you know that's not _really_ our Marcie, _or_ your parents."

Velma, sad and annoyed that someone like Shaggy Rogers could be so insufferably insightful, when he wanted to be, spoke with quiet pain.

"Y'know, only you could be both tactful and untactful at the exact same time. If we'd stayed in our own universe when history had changed, they _could_ have been, and I don't need _you_ to remind me of that."

Shaggy, regret in his eyes for mercifully forgetting the tragic cross they had to bear, hung _his_ head. "Like, I'm sorry, Velma."

Velma stoned up inside. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream to whatever god was in charge of time travel, and spit in his/hers/its cosmic face for setting her and her friends against an ancient evil, and then getting cheated out of a better life, for their troubles.

"Forget your pity," she told him bitterly. "Don't you have a sandwich you need to stuff in your mouth, right now?"

Everyone within the van held still, not daring to openly complain their lot, for the sake of friendship and team unity, but secretly, internally, voicing their own discontent at a cruel unfairness more profound than any they had ever experienced from either parents, or adults, in general.

And as the _Mystery Machine _passed under the highway sign welcoming them into the great state of Utah, they began to wonder, with heartrending clarity, if the Evil Entity, in death, had gotten the last laugh, after all.

The interior of the Crystal Cove Police Department could, at best, be described as a casual workplace environment, most days. Deputies sat at computer terminals, filling out paperwork, explained legal concerns to citizens over the telephone, or drank coffee while they chatted with the odd minor offender in the building's holding cells.

With so little law _enforcement_ to do in such a relatively quiet town, the deputies often felt less like law officers, then small town stereotypes, but whenever they thought about what was probably happening to their big-city brethren in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco, things that could charitably be described as quick, brutal and messy, they would swallow their self-conscious, collective pride, and bear their public image dutifully.

One of the deputies turned in the direction of the Sheriff's Office, and before munching on his second cruller, called out, "Sheriff! There's a girl here to see you!"

Marcie stepped into the office and took in the cluttered desk and even more cluttered bulletin board, with the odd wanted picture almost obscuring the post-it from Mayor Nettles reminding the sitting sheriff to bring some milk from the store after work.

Sheriff Bronson Stone looked up from his crossword puzzle to regard this obviously unauthorized person.

"Who are you? How did you get in here?"

"One of your deputies let me in," Marcie said, approaching his desk and looking at his progress. "Don't you know who I am, Sheriff?"

Stone, peering and concentrating on her features, drew a quick blank. "Not particularly. I'm a busy man, protecting Crystal Cove from villainous scofflaws, and you're just the latest in a long line of people who need my…long years of expertise."

Ignoring his self-important speech, Marcie scrunched up her nose at the officer. "_Scofflaws_? Have you been talking to my dad?"

"What a minute," Stone said, stiffening. "You're not one of those liberal law students studying for a police brutality case, again, are you?"

"No, Sheriff," Marcie said patiently, then pointed down at the puzzle. "And sixteen down, two across? The answer is 'sesquicentennial'."

Stone laid back in his chair. "That's a relief! Because the last thing I need is someone coming down here to give _me_ a lecture on...Uh, what was that word again? _Sibyl_? _Civilian_?"

"Civil Liberties?"

"Bingo!" Stone said, nonplussed.

"No, Sheriff, I'm Marcie Fleach. The girl you sometimes hire to baby-sit your kids?"

Crisis averted, Stone returned to his "paperwork." "Oh. Okay. Well, what can I do for you, Mackenzie?"

"That's _Marcie_," she corrected him. "And I wanted to talk to you about what happened at the mall earlier today."

Stone gave a world-weary sigh. _Geez, not another one, _he thought. _Don't these busy-bodies have enough on their plate, without checking up on us to make sure they we're doing our job?_

"Didn't one of the deputies already take down your statement at the mall? Don't worry, miss. The Crystal Cove Police Department will look into this," he said without looking up from his desk.

"Oh, thank you, Sheriff," Marcie said to the near-back of his head. _Maybe Velma was wrong about Sheriff Stone, after all._

"Right after we solve this backlog of _real_ crimes that are plaguing our fair town."

_Then again…_

"What? You're saying what happened at the mall didn't _rate_?" Marcie asked incredulously, almost losing control of her 'indoor voice' in the process. "According to your wife, the _mayor_, Crystal Cove has one of the lowest crime rates in the state. Don't _you_ want to make sure that that's the case by looking into this?"

Stone lifted his head and leaned towards Marcie conspiratorially. "You may not know this, but Her Honor, Mayor-wife _has_ to say things like that to placate you citizens and protect you all from the truth."

"Which _is_?" Marcie asked with border-line sarcasm.

"That this town is just a gnat's wing from falling into the abyss of urban decay and degradation. As her husband, I'm, of course, privy to such political bomb-shells, like this. I mean, it's bad enough that there's a group of punks out there, breaking into people's homes and places of business, but now they made the mistake of making it personal."

"How so?"

Taking the tone of a grizzled Hollywood cop, Stone growled, "They're doing it _my_ town." Then he began to talk, or in this case, rant, normally. "Not to mention all the littering, jaywalking, and curfew breaking that usually goes on here. We have to be vigilant, Miss Fletch. Ever vigilant."

Marcie looked exasperated. "It's _Fleach_, and look, Sheriff, what happened at the mall might be connected to your story about those punks. That hippy had some teens with him when he left, that robbed three stores while he was there. Now, that lady who was hit by that explosion, and those mallcops, are in the hospital and are doing fine, now, but that clown could have really hurt somebody. Aren't you concerned about that?"

Stone stared at her dismissively. This conversation was starting to get too critical for his liking. "I thought you said he was a _hippy_. Look, Macy-"

"Marcie."

"Mary. We don't have one of those big, fancy-shmancy crime divisions here."

"But-"

"I can't shut down Crystal Cove and call men away from more important cases, just because of one of those Internet pranks that you young people seem to _love_ to make, got away from you," he lectured.

"But-"

"I'm sorry, miss," Stone said pointedly. "But we're just a hard-working, small town police department, that's all, and you'll just have to be thankful that people like me are watching over you and all the good folk of Crystal Cove when you sleep at night. Now, is there anything else, Miss Fleece?"

Marcie, frustrated, walked from his desk, and prepared to leave his office, saying, "It's Fleach, and no, Sheriff Stone, I've got nothing else to say. In fact, you've made a previously hard decision, very simple for me. Sorry for wasting your time…_sir_."

"Sir" was what she may have said, but as she left the office, her mind screamed at him, _'Blowhard!'_

Finally having the room to himself again, Stone soliloquized, "Ah, the life of a sheriff is, indeed, a thankless job. Part crimefighter, part peacemaker, part babysitter."

Upon remembering something just then, he looked out of his doorway and called out to the departing Miss Fleach.

"Oh, hey! Are you still free to baby-sit the kids this weekend?" he asked her simply.

"Yeah, I'll be over at six." Marcie answered with equal tone. There may have been bad blood between them, at the moment, but when it came to extra money via baby-sitting, business was always business.


	4. 4

4~

The area of the mall's thoroughfare where Ringleader was last seen, as well as the store that was destroyed in the attack, _The Bows and Bangles Boutique_, was cordoned off with police tape, forcing the mall's human traffic to go around it, like cars passing a highway accident scene.

Marcie stood in the entranceway of the Orange Ya Glad Eatery, soda in hand, trying to look as if she belonged there, as the people flowed back and forth in tighter lanes, thanks to the cordon.

It was near closing time for the place and the customer population was thinning here and there. All that concerned her, however, was the mall security officer, who stood a short distance away, assigned to guard the crime scene.

Thinking back to how the criminals had escaped, Marcie wanted a chance to collect all of the evidence she could. If they had somehow gotten the smoke balls and bombs locally, it could be possible to trace them and find out the identity of the buyer.

Looking down at the tiled floor constantly trod upon by patrons, she hoped that valuable clues hadn't been crushed underfoot, or kicked away before she could search.

"Let's see," Marcie thought to herself aloud. "The mallcop is across the pathway from me. This Ringleader stood about where he is now, so I can't search there."

She leaned out of the entranceway casually, looking down the walkway to the right.

"But his little band was standing further up the path, where the stores were robbed, and _they're_ not taped off. If I can look around the floor there, hopefully, I should find something. But how?"

Marcie pinched the upper bridge of her nose to massage her eyes and rub the weariness of the day from her. Then, in surprise, as she looked at her raised spectacles from within, she had her answer.

The electronics store that was hit earlier was still being managed by a much more warier manager, as he stood vigil by the cash register. He decided, after a police question-and-answer session, that was made more uncomfortable by the slight headache he received after the sleeping gas wore off, that the store could still be run in the remaining hours before closing. Profit had won out over caution.

Marcie innocently sauntered into the store from the moving crowds, her eyes surreptitiously scanning every corner of the place, and quickly understanding what the thieves must have felt as they cased the establishment before making their move.

The manager watched her come in, but said nothing, glancing occasionally back to the throngs of people cruising outside.

Towards the back, Marcie saw the pride of the store, a large stereo system held in a towering entertainment center, its sheer bulk saving it from being plundered.

A plan crept into her mind, and soon she was strolling up to the counter.

"Excuse me," Marcie said with a pleasant smile plastered on her slightly nervous face. "I was wondering how much is that stereo system in the back worth."

Any wariness flew from the manager in the face of a major sale. "That's top-of-the-line, there, miss. Three hundred eighty dollars. We accept all credit cards, of course."

"Of course," Marcie agreed as she reached into her inner jacket pocket and pulled out a card that suddenly slipped out of her hand and fluttered to the carpeted floor.

"Oh, I'll get that," she said, quickly dropping out of the manager's sight from his point of view behind the counter.

"All right," he said, shrugging the moment away.

With a careful pace, Marcie crawled around the floor like a predator on a scent trail, using her fingers to probe the carpet's fibers while she looked for anything too unusual to be in an electronics store, and glancing up, every now and again, to see if she were being watched, herself.

"How's it going down there?" the manager asked from above.

"Oh, uh, it's a slippery little thing," Marcie countered. "I-I almost have it, though. Don't worry."

"Okay."

Marcie frowned to herself, for one, to risk being seen in the mall, crawling about the floor like a dog in heat, and for the other, seeing that the floor was depressingly clean.

He must have vacuumed, she thought grimly. Then she saw it.

A small, shining shell of clay winked just into her view from the threshold of the store's entranceway. The fact that she could only see the one piece meant that the manger might have, indeed, had the floor cleaned prior to her being there. She crawled towards the precious clue with a shark's focus.

With a swift hand motion, she plucked the fragment up and deftly dropped it into an empty vial she pulled from her jacket pocket. Looking up to prepare to stand, she saw the mallcop, still standing at his post, heroically fighting boredom.

Grinning triumphantly, she stood up to address the manager. "I think I have it."

"Oh, good!" he said. "Would you like to pay for it now, or with our payment plan?"

Almost forgetting her ruse, Marcie gestured to the stereo, asking, "Is there any way I could hear it? Y'know, to know how it sounds?"

"Sure," assured the businessman, happy to help a customer, and eager for the sale. "You can play this."

He bent down behind the counter, and when he rose again, he had a cd in his hand. Marcie took it and walked over to the music system.

As the manager was preoccupied for a moment, she found herself frowning again. She had gotten what she came for, so far, and she was only wasting what little time she had before the whole mall would close for the day. She wanted to check out the store that was blown apart by Ringleader, but as long as the security officer guarded the area, that was impossible. If only he were called away for a moment.

She opened the glass door that protected the stereo's components, saw the cd player's door, and place the disk inside.

She was about to press _Play_, when she checked the volume control to make sure that it wasn't too loud. Then, a thunderbolt of an idea made her full lips curl up in devious smile.

Reaching into her jacket again, she carefully slipped out a small vial of clear gel and pulled off the stopper. Keeping her back to the manager, she poured a little dollop of the substance on the inside edges and corners of the glass door, then placed the vial back into her inner jacket pocket.

Then, she turned to the businessman. "Mind if I step out for a second? I want to tell my friend that I'm going to buy this."

The manager nodded. "Okay, but hurry back. The mall getting ready to close."

Marcie nodded back, then turned back to the stereo's controls. Pressing the button marked _Play_, she then turned the volume all the way to maximum. Then she closed the glass door, which sealed tight, thanks to the homemade super-adhesive she applied, and skipped out of the store before the manager was suddenly assaulted by the loudest explosion of music to ever come from his shop.

The stereo's sound system was everything the store promoted and more, threatening to shake the windows of the neighboring stores out of their frames. Patrons turned in consternation to the noise and could see the panicking manager trying to open the door of the stereo without breaking the glass, and desperately failing to do so.

Marcie quickly walked up to the mallcop and, trying to keep an innocent face, said to him with a false amount of urgency, "Sir, the manager says he needs your help. One of the stereos was damaged during the robbery and he can't turn it off."

The officer looked in the direction of the now offending store, looked back at where he stood, and then, to Marcie's horror, reached for his walkie-talkie to probably call for assistance.

But before he could talk into it, the mall's PA system, amazingly, could be heard over the blaring music announcing that the mall was going to close in ten minutes' time.

With that in mind, the officer decided to chance it, counting on no one having the time to trespass inside the cordon. Thanking Marcie, he headed off towards the store, holding his ears tightly.

Marcie thanked him back, under her breath, before quickly slipping under the police tape, and then, under the thick plastic tarp that covered _Bows and Bangles Boutique's _dark entrance.

Pulling out a penlight from her jacket pocket, Marcie swung the focused beam around the front of the store. The blast wasn't fiery, she remembered, which explained why she saw no burn marks anywhere.

In fact, the whole blast area, from the threshold to the counter and the nearest shelving, was intact, just lightly painted in what looked like the same colored dye as the explosion's. Only the inoperative security shutters were damaged, possibly by the incredible pressure wave of the colorful explosion.

Casting her light on the carpeted floor, she saw that its surface was faintly coated with the same dye. Taking out a cotton cloth from her jacket, she wiped a sample of it off, and then pocketed the cloth again.

Hearing the PA system announce that the mall was now closing, hastened Marcie's investigation, so she stepped further in to do some last-minute checking.

Stopping halfway in the store's interior, she raised the penlight's beam, pointed it at the rear of the store, and noticed something.

She saw a clean rear. No colored dust anywhere. Just an untouched interior aft of the otherwise tinted storefront.

Marcie found herself standing in the demarcation of a possible clue, that seemed as much a mystery, as the mystery itself.

Turning off her light, she briskly walked back to the entrance, peeked out of it to check for mallcops, and, finding none, slipped swiftly out of the messy store and out of one of the mall's rear entrances.

Walking down the concrete path away from the now locked entrance doors, Marcie's mind was running full speed. She had evidence, actual clues to a heist, and visual clues to ponder, as well. She couldn't wait to tear into her home lab and crack the case wide open.

The sound of something heavy bumping, banging and shuffling inside one of two dumpsters standing abreast, startled Marcie, prompting her to quicken her pace.

With thoughts of large, unsavory animals rustling within, looking for food, she thankfully almost passed the large containers, when one of the lids swung up and open, and the goggled, disheveled head of Daisy Blake popped up.

"Whew!" she said relievedly. "I thought you were a mall cop. Hey, could you be a dear and keep an eye out for them? Thanks."

Incredulous recognition of one of the town's richest girls caused Marcie to stop in her tracks.

"You're one of the Blake Sisters," Marcie said. "What are you doing in a dumpster?"

"Dumpster diving. It's sort of a hobby of mine," Daisy answered matter-of-factly. She extended a work gloved hand out of the dumpster and shook Marcie's accepting one. "Daisy Blake. How're you doing?"

Marcie was taken aback by all of this. This was an incongruity for the history books. A Blake..._in coveralls_..._in the trash!_

"Uh...I'm fine. Thanks for asking," Marcie managed to say. Then she asked, "Were you in there all day?"

"Nah," Daisy shrugged. "I got in a few minutes before closing. That's the best time to root around and find some of the best stuff."

"Uh, don't take this the wrong way, Daisy," Marcie said tactfully. "But you _do_ know you're rich, right? You can just _buy_ the best stuff, can't you?"

Again, Daisy shrugged, smiling. "Yeah, I know, but what's the fun in _buying_ everything you want? Sometimes, you just have to go out and dig things up for yourself, y'know? Discover new things, even if they're old."

Marcie found herself giving a quirky smile right back to her. She couldn't believe it, but she honestly could sympathize completely with what Daisy had said. Wasn't _she _digging for clues, proactively getting to the bottom of this mystery because she refused to have someone hand her the results?

Like Daisy, she was prepared to get dirty, even jeered for her actions, and didn't care a jot. The thrill was in the search, the joy was in the hallowed hunt. Inquisition would prove, in time, to be its own reward.

"I totally understand," said Marcie quietly.

"Hey, if you're interested, there are some good dumpsters around the back of that big box store up the road. But don't dig around the mall. That's _my_ spot," Daisy suggested amicably. "We divers have to be protective of our territories, y'know?"

"Well, I hadn't thought about diving into dumpsters lately," Marcie said thoughtfully. "But _I_ am currently working on solving my first mystery, and may have to go _inside_ them to get the kind of clues that others wouldn't look for."

"Well, you're in luck, then," Daisy offered. "It's getting kind of late, but, if you want, gimme a call, and I can give you a crash course in diving. How's that?"

"I'd like that. Thanks, Daisy."

"Great. Well, I won't keep you. I have to see what new treasure awaits," Daisy said, before sinking into the dumpster again.

Marcie turned to continue walking, shaking her head at the strangeness of the moment, when she noticed some large cardboard boxes piled in a crude pyramid against the side of one of the dumpsters.

She would have dismissed them as just damaged boxes, except something in their appearance struck Marcie as strange, as well.

The boxes seemed more or less intact for their rough condition, except for the one side that they all sported, which was blown open with a nearly circular hole that formed petals of torn cardboard around its periphery.

Peering down at the sticker of one of the torn boxes, she saw the name Bows and Bangles Boutique printed on its surface, along with its shipping address within the mall.

_Another clue_, she thought decisively.

Giving a light tap upon the side of the dumpster Daisy was occupying, Daisy reemerged.

"What?" she asked anxiously. "You see a mall cop?"

"No," Marcie assured her. "I just wanted to know if you took those boxes out of the dumpster." She gestured to the pile on the ground.

"Oh, yeah. I was going to use them to carry some of my stuff back home with me. Why?"

"I think those boxes are a major clue in my investigation," Marcie explained, surprised to hear herself sounding like a full-blown detective.

Daisy assumed a pose of serious contemplation, weighing whether or not it was in her best interests to part with such a find. Then she came to her decision.

"Tell you what. I'll give you one of the boxes, if you have something to trade me in exchange."

Now it was Marcie's turn to look thoughtful. It was a fair decision, but what did she have to trade with? Then it hit her.

"How about my penlight?" Marcie offered. "It must get pretty dark in those things. A flashlight could really give you the edge in finding better stuff."

If she wanted to sell the idea of having a portable source of light any further, she needn't have bothered. Daisy reached out and shook her hand firmly.

"Deal," she agreed, accepting the penlight.

"Deal," Marcie confirmed, before walking off with one of the damaged boxes, satisfied.

The next day, in school, Marcie was jolted by something she wholly did not expect. A summons.

"Will Marcie Fleach please report to the Principal's Office," the school's venerable PA system crackled from the speaker hung over the classroom. "Will Marcie Fleach please report to the Principal's Office. Marcie Fleach, please report to the Principal's Office."

"Go on," the teacher bade her.

Marcie felt a bit conflicted by all of this. She worried about what the Principal would have wanted with her. As far as she knew, no one knew about the attempts to have keys she made so she could get into the school after hours, and use the science labs' spectroscopic analyzer during those trickier analyses, but that could change.

All in all, she thanked Heaven for the small favor of being called from the boredom of German language class, as she left the room.

Principal Quinlan allowed Marcie enter after the girl knocked cautiously upon the oak office door. Upon entering, Marcie was surprised to see, not a fuming father, but a woman she hadn't expected to see.

Joanne Barlow, recuperated owner of the still destroyed Boutique, sat comfortably in front of Quinlan's desk, watching Marcie slowly walk in with a confused look on her face.

"I believe you've met Miss Barlow already, Marcie?" Quinlan asked as a way of introducing the two. "Please sit."

"Yes, Miss Quinlan," Marcie answered, taking the chair across from Joanne.

She could have sworn that the woman was a little bigger than she looked now. Chunkier. But maybe that was a trick of the eye due to all of the excitement of yesterday.

"Marcie," Joanne said. "I know that it was you helped me when my store blew up yesterday. After I got out of the hospital, I wanted to find you and thank you personally. You risked your life to look after me when that horrible hippy attacked, and I want you to know that anything I have, is yours."

Marcie's eyes doubled in size after that. A childish person might have took the woman up on her offer, but in the presence of two adults, looking upon her as mature in their sight, Marcie knew she had but one response.

"No, ma'am," the young woman said firmly and proud. "I was there and I just did what I had to do to keep you safe. I _am_ sorry about your store, though."

Joanne waved the matter away. "It's alright. It was insured and everything in it can be replaced."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Please, Marcie, call me Joanne."

"Okay, Joanne," Marcie said, then added, "Oh, if it means anything, I'm pretty close to finding out who that hippy guy was, this Ringleader."

Joanne perked up somewhat. "Really? Are you sure? Do you know his name?"

"Not yet. But he and his crew left some pretty unique evidence behind in the mall yesterday. Not to brag, but I'm pretty good with chemicals, and I should be able to narrow down wherever he went to to get his little smoke bombs and whatever explosives he obviously used to wreck your store."

"Well, you should be careful, Marcie," Joanne advised her. "If he could stop a mall full of people, there's no telling what he could do if he knew someone was trying to stop him, like I tried to."

"I understand, Joanne, and I will be careful, _believe me_," Marcie assured her.

Joanne took the time to glance at her watch during the lull in conversation, and started.

"Oh, my goodness! I have to go. I have to meet with a man from the insurance company to assess the damage to my store. I _still_ wish I could give you something for all your help, Marcie."

"Don't worry, Joanne," Marcie told her, standing when Joanne stood to leave. "Like I said, I was there and I wanted to help."

Then, Joanne brightened. "Ah! I know what I can do."

She opened her purse and took out a slender, golden bracelet with a fiery ruby set upon it.

"It's my favorite piece of jewelry, way better than what I sell in the store, that's for sure," she joked, handing it over to a humbled Marcie.

It looked fragile, delicate, and glowed like wrought sunlight, in the office. Marcie thought it would look stunning on her, but didn't want to feel like some mercenary by quickly accepting it.

But then the choice wasn't hers to make, as Joanne's slender fingers placed the fine bangle into Marcie's palm and then closed Marcie's slim fingers closed around it.

"I insist," Joanne said, smiling proudly at the girl. "Besides, it probably looks better on you than on me, anyway."

She closed her purse and marched towards the doorway, but said in passing, "Think of what you'll be able to tell your grandchildren!" Then she left the office and the two perplexed women therein.

After a minute, Quinlan regarded Marcie, and said, almost churlishly, "It could've looked good on me, too, y'know?"

The chalk dust tickled her nose when Marcie went up to the chalkboard to work on the assigned algebraic equation in Math class.

"Somebody open a window," someone whined behind Marcie, back at the seating area. "It's as hot as an _oven_ in here."

Marcie faced the board. To anyone else who hadn't studied enough about Algebra, coming up to the board, in front of all the class and teacher, knowing he or she would fail, thanks to the glaring mistakes he or she would write on the board, made this feel less like an educational exercise, and more like one being propped up against a wall for execution by firing squad, and one having, at least, the option to cowardly turn away, to get the bullets in the back.

She calmly sized up the numbers in her head, as she had been taught, finessing sense from the equation that was necessary to crack the mathematical shell to release the satisfying answer within.

_Equations..._

Her mind shifted without warning to her latest formulaic wrestling match, her newest attempt to create what she would term "Super Helium", a synthetic analog of true helium that would lift far greater weight per cubic foot of volume. It had been her brass ring, her Philosopher's Stone, the one chemical that had always eluded her, tempted and taunted her, every since she was old enough to grasp the Periodic Table of Elements.

Though with every failure, she wondered sometimes if it was more her _Moby Dick_ than Holy Grail, an obsession that would ultimately reward her, not with glory, but, as it would seem, social suicide.

But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she would win in the end. The conundrum of the formula would yield to the strength and flexibility of her young mind...

_Yield..._

The signs. All of those traffic signs. She would have to learn them and respect the reason why they existed. And the arrows and markings on the streets, that once she hadn't a care of knowing about, now shook her deeply from within, taunting her for her ignorance.

Marcie dolefully embraced her insecurities about her upcoming driver's test. She only ever saw the act of driving before as purely a mechanical exercise, merely lever pulling, pedal pushing and wheel turning. Glumly, she realized that that was only the surface of it all, that the real expertise had lain with _safety,_ and not just the technical manipulation of a two-ton machine.

She thanked Heaven that Crystal Cove High had a Driver's Education course, and had attended it every week, after school. She studied as hard as she had time to do so.

All of this learning to prepare her for the true test to come, was wholly appreciated, and she hoped sincerely that it wasn't for naught, due to her choking in front of the instructor, when the time came. For when that mystery was settled, then the fun would really begin. The search for a car to call her own!

_Mystery..._

She actually felt a pulse of pride in starting her own investigation concerning Ringleader and his crew. She would match her wits against his and bring him to justice, the only satisfying result.

However, she also realized, secretly, that outsmarting and outmaneuvering the law…_to help the law_…was giving her body a tingling rush she had never experienced before. It made her breath catch in her breast and made her senses sharper. Everything felt electric and alive, because she doing things she wasn't supposed to do, yet doing them all on the side of the angels.

Technically doing bad...to do good. It was like some dangerous, unearthed, forbidden tonic to her. If she could find a way to bottle it, she would never sell it, but horde it like a miser...

Smiling to herself, she wondered, jokingly, if this was ever covered in Sex Ed class...

And then, standing, she drifted off to sleep, her face pressed against the blackboard, chalk dust coating her face like some coarse make-up.

"Miss Fleach," math teacher Douglas Gamble called out patiently amid the chuckles from the class. She didn't stir, but snored softly on.

"Miss Fleach, this is a classroom, not a flophouse. Wake up, now, if you please!" he said firmly, yet loudly enough that she snorted herself awake.

Rubbing her eyes and ignoring the students' laughter, she turned wearily to face Mr. Gamble.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Gamble," excused Marcie.

"Miss Fleach," Mr. Gamble interrupted. "_When_ you decide to sleep at your home is your own concern. However, what you do in this school, and in my class, is very much _my_ concern."

Marcie's head dipped in embarrassment. "Yes, sir."

"Now, are you not being challenged enough? Just because you're one of my best students, don't think that will get you off the hook for daydreaming about chemical formulas, street signs and a circus ringleader."

Marcie stood confused. "Huh?" He pointed at the board.

She turned to see where her work on the algebra problem began to degenerate into a downward, increasingly sloppy scrawl, first, of a half completed formulaic expression, then, of a short list of traffic terms and street signs, and lastly, the word "ringleader" ending in a crooked line from the final _r _drawn straight down before she went to sleep.

"You must keep your focus on you studies, if you are to pass my class," Mr. Gamble told her.

"Yes, sir," she said, wishing hard that he would dismiss her, so she could leave his sight and sit down again.

In fact, he was about to say "Be seated", when the bells rang throughout the school, signaling the end of lessons for the day.

After school, Marcie's stomach flip-flopped with worry. She fearfully wondered why she couldn't stay awake.

She had managed to keep her wavering balance in the afternoon heat, but she knew it wouldn't last, as long as she kept trying to walk the streets towards home.

The rush she had from her embarrassment in Math class had worn off with a vengeance, and now it was taking every erg of energy, every scrap of willpower, just to stay awake, to stay conscious, in the middle of the street.

She wished she could sleepwalk, praying that some preternatural homing sense would guide safely home, but that was not to be.

"I...I gotta..._sleep_ somewhere," Marcie mumbled into her chest, so difficult it had become to lift her head.

With effort, she managed to raise the head just enough that it canted to the side, but she could blearily see an alley up ahead. Devoting all available energy to the task, she stumbled like the town lush towards its general direction.

She was conscious enough to appreciate the strong odor of the denizens of the deep, as she swerved further into the alley. Apparently, the passage was part of a fish market's property, with a pong that only cats could love, but with its cooling shade, and out-of-the-way walls for catching some shuteye, to Marcie, it was nothing less than a dimly-lit Xanadu.

"Why do I feel so tired?" she asked herself, though the act of doing _that,_ drained her. "Should've...stayed...lab...after school...for Ringleader..."

"You called?"

Marcie's waning adrenaline spike created enough of a response from her to clumsily turn to the sound of the cocky voice, and feel the strong grip of a man in 60's period clothes practically hold her upright.

"Rrrringleaderrr," she droned, too tired to even facially express surprise. "...Ssstop...youuu..."

"I don't think so, Kitten," the hippy said with a confident chuckle. "You don't sound it now, but you had a lotta spunk at the mall helping that lady out yesterday. And y'know what? I think I have room for someone like you in my ministry of miscreants. Can you dig that?"

"Nnnnoooo..."

Ringleader laughed at Marcie's impotent reaction. "Girl, you sound like my old 8-track cassette player. Now, check out my cool shades."

Marcie held desperately to a shred of her mind left to resist the demand and closed her eyes, looking away.

Ringleader gave her a shake, hard enough to rouse her, and commanded again, firmly, _"Look at my glasses."_

Resigning to the fact that he would just shake her again, or do worse, if she didn't obey, Marcie unsteadily focused her eyes on the lenses of his rose-colored sunglasses.

Her mind was on auto-pilot, her eyes simply reacting and watching the tiny specks of glitter that seemed suspended in the lenses, themselves.

From what little light there was in the alley, the glitter, incredibly, caught it, and as Ringleader slowly turned and tilted his head slightly, it reflected it, creating a fireworks show in Marcie's sight and mind. Dazzling gold, silver and white sparks flared softly across the dark contrasts of the rosy tint.

Terrified, Marcie could feel herself falling, though she still was held up. Weariness and the mesmerizing sparkle of the spectacles was tearing the fingers of her consciouness away from the cliff's edge of her mind. The helplessness and vulnerability, in the face of this villain, frightened her most of all.

Then it happened. A sound, like a scream from the damned, too weak to be heard, whispered from her throat, the last sound of fearful defiance before Ringleader's hypnotic assault completely devoured her focus and her will, and only minute scraps of what was once Marcie Fleach remained.

He let her go, dismissively, and she fell in a heap against a dented trash can.

"Beautiful, baby," Ringleader said, seemingly more to himself, due to his handiwork, than to his victim.

He knelt down to where she slumped and whispered in her ear.

"Welcome to the Cult of Crime. You're one of my loyal disciples, now, chickadee. You'll do all you can to steal for me."

The words flowed into her mind like opium smoke, echoing and yet clinging stubbornly to her subconsciousness, refusing to let her forget them.

"Chickadeeee...Steal...for mmmeeee..." she repeated groggily.

"That's right. And just to show you that I'm not such a bad guy, what is it you want most in the whole wide world?" he whispered.

Marcie slowly closed her eyes, and then, a single tear slowly escaped its containment.

"Velllllmaaa...Her toooo commmme...back...hoooommme..."

Ringleader's face scrunched into a perplexed expression. He hadn't a clue who this "Velma" was, but if that was what this new member of his felonious flock wanted, who was he to argue? As long as it got him results.

He shrugged and whispered slowly to her once more.

"Hear me, child. For every mission you finish for me, a day with your friend you will spend with thee..."

He waited for the command to take effect, but he needn't have worried. Marcie parroted as best she could in compliance.

"Missssionn...forrr meeee...Frrrriend...wiiith...theeeee..."

"Out of sight," he said, satisfied. Then he stood up, brushed the dirt from his knee, turned about, and, whistling a casual tune, left his new found acolyte behind on the cold ground of the dark alley.


	5. 5

5~

Winslow adjusted his glasses while he watched the four department heads adjust their seating and listen to his presentation.

He gestured to the image beamed from the conference room's projector. A tastefully shot bird's eye view of the water slide attraction he had purchased was displayed on the screen beside him.

"This, people, is going to really bring in the customers," he told them with almost a child's enthusiasm. "This water slide is the investment of a lifetime. Summer's coming up, and what better way to beat the heat than to head on over to Fleach's Folly Factory's newest attraction, _The Whoosh_!"

"The..._Whoosh?" _Beatrice Sharpe, the park's sales director, asked slowly and incredulously.

"Yes!" Winslow answered, finding it hard to believe that the heads weren't more on board with this. "It's simple, it's catchy, and it sounds fun! _Whoosh! _Come on, everybody! Say it with me!"

The others joined in reluctantly, wondering, not for the first time, if their employer and beloved leader wasn't touched in the head.

"Whoosh!" Winslow called out again. "See? Now, as you know, construction began a few months ago, but it should be completed just in time for the Summer tourist season."

Beatrice leaned forward and pursed her lips in thought. "I wonder if we'll have time to make television advertisements announcing the new ride. T-shirts that say "I survived..._The_ _Whoosh!_"and the like."

Winslow sat down in his office chair. "We'll get in touch with that print company downtown, and we'll hire some film students from Darrow University to shoot the commercials."

The park security chief, a beefy, gray-haired paranoid of a man, named Robert Packard, grumbled, "We may have to beef up security and hire more officers because of interest in this new ride. The more people who'll show up for this, the more opportunities for _crime_, Mr. Fleach."

Winslow waved at the issue dismissively. "Not a problem, Robert. If need be, we'll put out an ad for any mallcops or deputies out there who want some extra money over the summer by working here."

A strange man by both nature and by reputation, the recreational director named Edward spoke up. "I'm confused, Mr. Fleach. This ride that you're talking about, will my ride technicians have to turn the water on and off, and make sure everybody's strapped down so they don't fall out of the ride? Looks rather complicated."

"No, Edward," Winslow explained pedantically, pointing to the various parts of the ride, and tying to remember why he hired him in the first place. Desperation must have been a factor at the time. "Everybody will slide down this wet chute, here. That's the ride. And quickly enter this large swimming pool below. That's the destination. The most we'll probably need to run it is a lifeguard."

Eleanor Angelina Shelby, the resident maintenance director and a transplant from neighboring Gatorsburg, said in her usual drawl, "A lifeguard, huh? Well, maybe I could pull double duty, then. I still got my old swimsuit from my days as a mechanic in _NASBOAT_."

Winslow shivered internally in distaste, thinking of her fat, elderly body squeezed into a one-piece swimsuit.

"Uh, that's quite alright, Eleanor," he said as diplomatically as he could. "I'm no slave driver and I'm not about to be one now. You work hard enough as Maintenance Director. Hmm...Perhaps, I could get Marcie to work as a lifeguard this summer."

The doors of the conference room flew open and a girl stepped inside with a confident gait. She wore bell-bottomed jeans, sandals, a blouse covered by a tasseled vest, a gold bracelet on her wrist and a big, floppy, brown, flower-covered sun hat that cast an almost concealing shadow over her grinning face.

In her hand, she squeezed a small plastic bottle that raised a ringed wand from its interior, from which, she was blowing bubbles.

Winslow watched the stranger carefully, grateful that Security Chief Packard was on hand. He stood authoritatively and addressed her.

"This is a staff meeting. Please, leave, or I will have to call security."

"Security?" the girl asked amusedly, walking casually around the table, trailing bubbles in her calm wake. She directed her shadowed gaze towards Winslow. "Are any of us _truly_ secure? But then, everybody knows _me _around here, Daddy!"

Upon hearing "Daddy" from her, Winslow recognized the voice, and only became more confused.

"_Marcie?_"

"Hi, Daddy," his daughter casually greeted him, assuming a playful pose. "Still trying to cut corners, as usual?"

He ignored the truthful jibe. "Why are you dressed like that?"

"Because my eyes have been opened at last, Dad!"

Winslow cocked his head to on side, still trying to make sense of the moment. "You don't need glasses anymore?"

Marcie, momentarily confused, herself, stopped for a clarifying beat, then continued with a slightly manic gleam in her eyes. "No! I'm saying that I don't need _rules_ anymore. Conformity's a trap we've all have been caught in since the day we were born, but I'm here to say that I'm free! And you can be, too, everybody."

She walked over Eleanor, and without preamble, took a flower from her hat, and carefully slipped it into the woman's salt-and-pepper hair.

"Why, thank you, darlin," Eleanor giggled, not knowing what to make of the gesture, but appreciating it, nonetheless.

As Winslow watched the proceedings, he decided that, while her being there wasn't being _too_ disruptive, it was slowing business down noticeably. Time was being wasted, and, as he was instructed so long ago, in Darrow University's Business Administration class, _time was money_.

"Marcie, what are you going on about?" he asked her sternly. "We're in the middle of a staff meeting. We have a lot of work to do to keep the Folly Factory running smoothly, because our competition won't be so understanding or lenient, come summertime."

Marcie looked unfazed by the reprimand. "But, Daddy, you're _always_ going to have competition in life. Why let that fact run you ragged? You'll find no time to enjoy the simple things that make life so _beautiful_."

And to illustrate that opinion, she leaned over, pleasantly, and blew a stream of soapy bubbles at Security Chief Packard, who just stiffened in their presence and coughed uncomfortably.

Winslow wearily shook his head. Just his luck that his only daughter would pick now, of all times, to follow a fad.

"That's nice, dear," he said condescendingly. "Now why don't you go boogie, or moon-walk, or whatever it is that you kids do, and we'll talk about all of this when I come home."

If his tone was intended to mock, or even dismiss Marcie's little evangel, she noticed none of it.

"Do you know that stress is one of the leading causes of death in this country?" she continued. "I can see it in your eyes, Dad. You're worried about the water slide. You're hoping that it'll bring in enough ticket sales to pay for itself."

She approached and calmly blew bubbles at the Recreational Manager, who loudly sneezed when some of the bubbles popped under his nose.

"Yes," her father admitted. "I'm concerned about its success, but I believe it will be worth the investment. I was _explaining_ that when you burst in, looking like an escapee from Woodstock. By the way, where did you _find_ that getup?"

Marcie walked up behind Beatrice, and put another flower in the hair of the Sales Director.

"_Turn Back The Cloth_, on Leary Boulevard," she answered matter-of-factly. "Anyway, I just don't want to see you burned out. I know you want to be the next amusement park icon, but I just think you're working too hard for it. You're special to me, Dad."

Winslow bristled and was about to sternly challenge her essentially calling him a workaholic in the company of those under him, when her gentle words hit him, and became momentarily moved by her honest plea.

"You mean the world to me, too, pumpkin," he sighed with a confident smile. "But nothing will happen to me. And you'll see that it will all be worth it when you have enough money to go to college."

Marcie walked away from the oval table, and then, upon reaching the doorway of the room, turned around to gauge her good-natured handiwork on the staff.

"Maybe, but I'd be happier just seeing you live long enough to see me graduate," she told him with a sober smile in return. "It's ironic, y'know? You spend all your life creating other people's vacations, and never took the time to have one of your own. See ya back home, Dad."

With that, she left the flower-strewn and bubble-filled board room, the executive staff watching the office doors quietly close, in uncomfortable silence.

"Kids, huh?" a stunned Winslow joked, trying to save the _already_ awkward conference.

The dusty, purple van looked like some poor man's Mystery Machine. It sat parked outside the boarded up and closed down _Groovitations_ dance club, in the geographically small, yet run-down section of town, after delivering another crop of brainwashed disciples.

Entering from the defunct emergency exit at the rear of the building, converts gathered and sat around the dirty dance floor, enraptured by the voice and the very sight of the man who held court on the DJ's dais, looking over his flock in the gloom of scattered candlelight.

"We have strayed from the path of least resistance, my wayward children," Ringleader preached deeply. "To do what moves us the easiest. We've been taught by parents, teachers, and authority figures, that the only way to get ahead in this sad world is to study, work hard, get good grades, and be a compliant member of society. Do you know what I say to all of that?"

Ringleader took a deep breath and bleated like a sheep before his audience. The audience then bleated in turn.

"That's right, my flock. That's what we once were. Sheep. But now, those misbegotten days are finally over, for you are liberated from all of that. Freedom is being willing to do what you want. I will free your minds of all hang-ups, so that you can experience whatever _you_ want, and all I ask is that you look out for some rich people to collect contributions from," he said.

The audience, so completely moved by the simplicity of what he asked, cheered in agreement and compliance. Marcie Fleach cheered, at least in her mind, loudest of all.

Ringleader brought up his bracelet-clad arms to quiet the masses.

"Now, I know some of you have been converted recently. Step up to me so that I may give you your first mission for our church. The test that will leave no doubt in my mind as to what cause you belong to."

Three girls slowly stood from the throng on the dance floor and walked quietly up to the dais, among them, Marcie. The girls watched Ringleader approach with baited breath.

He went to the first two, leaned in close, and whispered into their ears. The girls shivered visibly, recovered, and then returned to their place beyond the dais.

However, when Ringleader came to Marcie, he looked into her eyes and saw something he didn't expect to see so soon. Doubt.

Had his mesmerism worn off? That was troubling to him, but then, so was anxiety on his part, in front of his cultists. Any sign of weakness was suicidal to his schemes.

He forced the fear down and gave Marcie a warm, insincere smile. He was the master, and he would bring order back into his church, no matter how false it was.

"Marcie, what's wrong?" he asked her fatherly. "You are here, child, but I don't sense the commitment that brought you."

In response, Marcie bowed her head, turning her face away from her questionable savior. She couldn't bear, even now, to face him with such disgraceful thoughts of infidelity.

"Master," Marcie whispered sadly. "I...shame you with my wishy-washiness. I spoke to my father earlier. I-I wanted him to learn the path that you teach us, to live free, as _we_ do. But I don't think I swayed him. I failed to bring him into the fold. I failed you."

_So _that's_ what it was_, he thought relievedly. _She only had doubt in herself…to serve me._

Ringleader cupped her cheek with his hand and spoke with counterfeit understanding. "Oh, my child. The adult mind is like quick-drying cement, and would take the force of a hundred thousand chisels to break through all of that dogged, rigid thinking that they're slaves to. But you? You loved your father so much, that you tried to get through to him with…_love..._like...some beautiful, four-eyed jackhammer, or something."

"Really?" she asked earnestly.

"You haven't failed me, Marcie. You're my perfect little tool, uh, to, uh, spread the word," he told her, quickly recovering from his major faux-pas in time.

A small, grateful cascade of tears flowed down her face.

"Thank you! Thank you, master!" she blubbered. "What will you have me do for you?"

She was ready, Ringleader could see that now. Satisfied, he leaned over and softly whispered his commands to Marcie. His magnetic voice made her tremble in ecstasy, just as the old rafters above trembled to the cheers of her brothers and sisters below.

Marcie walked back to her place in the crowd, heart lifted with misguided love and determination.

She would not fail him.

The ornate door of the white Southern-style mansion hung open and impotent in the late afternoon sunlight. Opened just as wide and just as impotently keeping anyone out, was the half-melted family safe.

The antique china cabinet was ransacked and cleaned of meaningful silverware, crystal, and, of course, china. In the bedroom, jewelry, furs and designer clothing were taken, leaving behind a whirlwind-tossed mess therein.

In the kitchen, it was the capacious refrigerator that suffered. Any and all edibles there, were snatched out and consumed with all the vigor of a small army.

The army in question, marched out of the foyer, with sacks of booty, to the curb, where a purple van was idling.

The last person to leave the violated home was coolly tossing and catching the most valuable prize from the acid-defeated safe, a Faberge Egg. As she had wrested the prize from inside, herself, _she_ would have the honor of bringing it before her master as proof of her devotion.

As she stepped over the gassed forms of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Marcie couldn't help but hum in deep satisfaction.

Ringleader looked in the back of the van from the driver's seat. Cult members and sacks were piling in the back. Congratulations were given and taken all around, and there was a genuine feeling of camaraderie that truly sickened him as he waited for the last member to arrive.

From the driver's side, Marcie appeared before her master, holding the egg out to him reverently.

"Have I served you well?" she asked anxiously, her gaze respectfully lowered.

Ringleader snatched the treasure from her hands and gave it a quick appraisal. This was, indeed, a good haul, but it wasn't over yet. Crystal Cove still had much to give before the heat would come down on him, if it ever did, and he'd have to leave town.

Until it did, pawns like Marcie and the kids in the back of the van would be in high demand. He turned to her, smiling.

"Oh, yes, child. You are _solid_. You've proved to me that you are, indeed, one of us. Prepare for you reward."

Although she thought it inappropriate to look directly at him, Marcie raised her head in happy anticipation. The chance to see Velma again...The idea, alone, was too good to be real.

Ringleader reached out from the van and touched a pointed finger lightly upon Marcie's forehead, intoning, "For every mission you finish for me, a day with your friend you will spend with thee..."

Upon deep hypnotic command, the wiring was switched in Marcie's head. Instantly, her perceptions changed from within. The van, the Rogers' Mansion, and the surrounding neighborhood was gone, and in their place was a hazy, sparkling, happy world that was only populated by a moonstruck Marcie, and one other.

Walking from the imagined distance came a figure she had hoped against hope to see again.

Velma smiled upon seeing Marcie, and it was a smile that rivaled the sparkles that floated in Marcie's mind.

Marcie rushed over and hugged Velma fiercely, wanting to press against her until they were an amalgam of flesh and deep, honest affection.

Ringleader started the cranky, old van and pulled slowly from the curb, careful not to hit Marcie.

"Have fun," he yelled in the distance. "See you when you get back."

Of course, Marcie, hallucinating and _completely_ over-the-moon, couldn't, or didn't, hear her master's words. She was enjoying her time with her best friend in all the world, while she tightly hugged thin air in the middle of the affluent part of town.

The gradual California sunset painted the Crystal Cove Mall in subdued shades of rose and gold, and even the dumpsters placed around its periphery were not spared from its subtle colors.

One dumpster, in particular, boomed quietly with the thumps and bangs of someone inside.

Marcie gave a friendly tap on the dumpster's side, and, as she surmised, Daisy's head popped up out of the dank depths, scared and, as luck would have it, facing away from Marcie.

"I'm sorry, officer!" Daisy begged. "I…I was just looking for my contact lens!"

Marcie chuckled at the display. "Be mellow, Daisy. I'm not The Man."

Daisy turned to see Marcie and exhaled.

"_Whew! _Hey, Marcie! Nice ensemble. _Very_ retro. What can I do for you?

Marcie leaned contentedly against the steel front of the large container. "Oh, nothing. I just got through seeing a very special friend, and I thought I'd just hang out with you."

Daisy's mouth hung slack at that, a course of action so out-of-the-blue, it took her completely, and pleasantly, by surprise.

"Hang _out? _With _me?_ _Why?_"

"Why not?" Marcie shrugged merrily. "You're the only person I know who makes being around dumpsters cool. That's your gift to the world."

Even though Daisy was a fair deal older than Marcie, and could, at least, technically hang out with people her age, she was moved deeply by the sudden gesture.

"Wow. I never had anybody feel that way about me or my dumpster diving before," she admitted. "Normally, my parents would just shake their heads and say things like "Where did we go wrong?" and "She takes after your side of the family" and "Maybe we can trade her in for a new pair of shoes."

Marcie waved the sad tale away as something best left in the past. "Parents are so afraid of what they used to do when they were children, that they hate to see that same freedom in their own kids."

Daisy had to admit that she hadn't considered that, and her eyes opened wide in appreciation of that rather debatable nugget of wisdom.

"That is so _deep_. I'm glad you're here. My sisters just aren't interested in going on hunts with me. Though I'd swear that wasn't the case, some nights."

The inquisitor in Marcie sat up and took notice at that. "What do you mean?"

"Well, sometimes, late at night, I wouldn't see them in the house. I thought they might have been doing a little diving, themselves, but they wouldn't have anything in their bedrooms, afterwards, to show for it."

Marcie stroked her chin in thought. "Maybe they just found their own hiding place for their stuff."

Daisy conceded to that. "Maybe. I guess I shouldn't worry because they're together, and they can watch out for each other, but I _do_ worry. And they don't talk about where they go when they get back. I've asked them, sometimes, but all they do is look at each other and chuckle."

"Bummer, my friend."

Daisy looked glum for a moment, wishing she hadn't brought up the topic, so she could relax with a new friend and root around through the finest dumpsters in town.

Then a thought sparked in her mind and she suddenly looked hopeful.

"Hey, I know! _You_ could probably find out. You're a detective, and all, right?"

Marcie raised her hands in a gesture of apology, feeling as though Daisy were trying to call her out of retirement after decades in the PI game.

"I'm sorry, Daisy. I've hung all that up. Something more _interesting_ came into my life."

"Boys?"

Marcie gave a dismissive snort and scoffed. _"Please!"_ Then her expression turned dreamy. "Ringleader…"

Daisy gave Marcie a friendly, yet quizzical look. _Who the heck was _Ringleader_? _she thought.

The candles flickered in the deserted gloom of _Groovitations_, early that evening, when Marcie opened the rear emergency door to let herself in.

She walked into the elevated lounge area of the dance club. There were some table left behind from its closing, but she wasn't in the mood for sitting. Most cult members who skulked around after a sermon, preferred to stand or sit in the shadows, either for privacy's sake, or for the practice of intimidation.

In any event, Marcie knew where they were, anyway, from the chemicals she could smell and detect while she stood by the architecturally curved wall on one side of the lounge.

"Hey," she said to some particularly dark shadows by the nearby wall. "Somebody was asking around for you."

A young woman's voice answered softly. "Really? Who?"

"Your sister."

Three young, redheaded women dressed in hippy clothes, but wearing the same face, strolled leisurely from out of the shadows.

"Well, maybe it's time we introduce Daisy to the master," said Dawn Blake with a malevolent glint in her eyes.

Dorothy Blake slyly chimed in. "Yeah. Too bad the other sister's married and little_ Daphne's _not around…"

"But the Blake Sisters can _still_ be one big happy family," Delilah Blake finished in cruel anticipation.

The deliciously sinister thought of having yet another soul fall to Ringleader's clutches made Marcie and the remaining Blakes feel delightfully bad.

They all gave a decadently freeing laugh, and for a brief moment in time, the Cult of Crime had become a little darker in the night.


	6. 6

6~

The rest of the school week could charitably be described as eventful for Marcie Fleach.

Whenever their parents went to sleep, or performed their husbandly and wifely duties, Marcie, and other cultists, would cruise, prowl, and pillage Crystal Cove bit-by-larcenous-bit. With Ringleader playing the role of alpha male, he would send his tie-dyed wolf packs out for swift plunder.

Marcie found herself doing night shift on that score, either assisting in nightly heists that were planned days before, or going on Ringleader-approved, solitary, late-night hunts, randomly choosing homes that looked like they housed, at least, upper middle class families, melting their locks with acid, gassing the occupants, swiping money and credit card-laden wallets, purses, jewelry, and destroying the safes and vaults with even stronger acids, all homemade, and therefore, untraceable.

Her days turned out to be just as memorable.

Ever since Ringleader activated her reward trigger, she would spend long and lively days chatting, dancing, singing, going on walks, going to lunch, reading to, and being read to, by the phantom Velma Dinkley, while anyone close enough to notice the solitary girl gregariously interacting with nothing, would just shake his or her head in pity for her obviously slipping sanity.

However, an after-effect that she couldn't have noticed or prepare for was a gradual addiction to the reward events she was enjoying. Just as Ringleader had planned.

Happy slaves were, after all, harder working ones, and the individually tailored reward triggers he implanted in the victims' minds were the perfect, cost-effective way for obedience.

And, as it so happened, the longer the servitude, the stronger the hallucinations, and the stronger the need for them. In fact, so complete were the ones playing in Marcie's addled mind, that whenever she invited "Velma" to school and tried to reintroduce her to people there, the befuddled, angry, and dismissive reactions she would get, made her seriously believe that the people who couldn't see or interact with the illusory Ms. Dinkley were either absolutely insane, or trying to play some cruel trick on Marcie that obviously didn't work.

She already had to deal with the jeers and jibes she encountered in school for her normal style of dress, now intensified, due to her _current_ style of dress. But the solidarity she enjoyed from seeing other cult members going to school in similar garb, put her mind at ease these days.

The early evening breeze gently tousled the lawn in the back of the Fleaches home, flowing through the windows and flickering the lit candles arrayed around the interior of Marcie's lab, a large, former storehouse and garden shed that her father had cleared out, modified, and gave to her for her thirteenth birthday.

The door creaked open, allowing Winslow, who had come home early from work, to see his daughter sitting stoop-shouldered on her stool, watching something with silent interest.

Unobtrusively stepping in, he gave the interior an inspectional look-see. Although the tapers' glow gave the building a somber mood, he could see that everything was, more or less, fine with the lab. Its counters, tables, sinks, and concrete floor were clean. Its chemicals, volatile and otherwise, its Bunsen burners, and most of its glass- and cookware was put in storage, as was proper for the upkeep and maintenance of a laboratory when not in use.

However, instead of seeing the usual bubbling concoctions she would be frequently working on, and the loose notes that would be scattered everywhere or pinned to the already note-covered bulletin board, all of her remaining and exposed beakers, test tubes and flasks had been placed beside the candles and turned into makeshift lava lamps.

"Marcie? Are you okay?" Winslow asked. "I thought you'd be working on some strange potion, like always. Plus, I'm pretty sure lighting that many candles in a laboratory is dangerous."

Marcie continued watching a flask lava lamp dreamily.

"Groovy," she answered back. "Hey, Dad. Did you know that lava lamps were invented by a British accountant, and are just a mixture of mineral oil, paraffin wax and carbon tetrachloride suspended in water? Far out."

Indeed, Winslow hadn't known that little factoid, but he put it out of his mind, for fear of getting side-tracked from what he really what to say.

"Far out. Yes," he replied. "Now, care to explain to me why you felt the need to disrupt my board meeting the other day? If you were upset that you weren't call to it, I apologize. I would have had you come, too, but you were in school and I didn't have time to reschedule to have it this weekend."

Marcie slowly turned to face Winslow, her demeanor, pleasantly enigmatic.

"See, Daddy? _That's_ why I crashed your scene the other day. You're too wound up in schedules and meetings. You're like a worker bee. You should just let _things _be. You'd _be_ much happier." She then chuckled at her own joke.

Solemnly, Winslow thought back and took a deeper look at Marcie's recent behavior, the part of it that he _did_ know about. It didn't feel like an innocent trend, now. It felt wrong, somehow, as though it was symptomatic of something else, something darker, and it bothered him.

"Hmm…Maybe it's _you_ who needs to take it easy once and a while," he said worryingly, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Don't think I haven't noticed you working so hard in school, so you can be a better chemist. But Marcie, dear, the lab will always be there. You're only young _once. _You can still be the best you always wanted to be, but it starts with you having a good time, once and awhile, too, you know?"

Winslow worried that she would lash out, tell him that he didn't know what he was talking about and that he should mind his own business. But Marcie just turned to him with a clearly grateful expression.

"Wow, Daddy, you really blew my mind. And I thought you were so _plastic_! The other girls in school wouldn't hang out with me, but let's a have a good time, _now_. Come watch these lava lamps with me! I promise no two globs are ever the same shape or size!"

_And I lost her again_, Winslow thought glumly. He began to back out of the lab slowly. As dearly as he loved his daughter, he could think of a thousand things he could be doing that didn't waste his time as much as staring at lava lamps until the cows came home.

"Errr, I have to go and, uh, watch the flowers grow in the yard," he evaded diplomatically, hoping that he didn't hurt her feelings. "I'll tell you how that goes when I'm done, okay?"

He made it to the threshold, and passed it, but didn't close the door. He leaned inside one more time, telling her, quietly, "I'll leave the door open, okay?" And then he left.

Marcie hadn't even noticed his departure, so mesmerized, was she, by the lava lamps.

"Groovy..." she said distantly.

He didn't call...

Marcie tossed and turned in her bed sheets, a sheen of sweat making her face glisten in her moonlit bedroom. It would have been a moment of private beauty to see, were it not for the agony in her eyes.

She silently prayed that her cellphone would vibrate, giving her the signal to serve her master once more, and more importantly, to succeed in said mission so she could get her daily fix of Vitamin V. But the small device on her dresser sat quietly, and Marcie just fidgeted some more, as a result.

She couldn't understand what was happening. Was she sick? Could it have been hot flashes? _At her age?_

She shook her head, dismissing the notions as unsubstantiated, hypochondriacal conjecture. If there was a plausible cause, Ringleader would surely know it.

But she couldn't go to him, not now. He had given strict instruction that while she was serving him at night, she could not contact him at night. Communication had to be one-way for security's sake, and she could not disobey.

Which was why she begged him from within to call her with something to do. Thievery, vandalism, even kidnapping would suit her, if he wished it, _but he had to wish it!_

For the twentieth time, she turned and looked at the cellphone, and shivered. Her body was not her own tonight. It writhed and shook and flailed all its own, and only her confused mind was lucid enough to try to make any semblance of sense to it all.

Marcie clamped her eyes shut in an effort to shut out the convulsions, and in the darkness of her thoughts, a phantasmal image floated up from its depths.

Velma.

Her stubborn, analytical mind seized the portent of the image of Velma, slammed it into the situation of her seizures, and twisted the meaning of the two, slowly, torturously slowly, until the answered glowed in her fevered mind like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

She grinned weakly at the simplicity and the incredibleness of the connection, and decided to have a mental chat with herself to confirm and sort it out.

_'Obviously, you're suffering from some sort of withdrawal, brought about by your lack of missions tonight,' _the analytical Marcie posited.

_'But why _this_ reaction?' _cult member Marcie countered. _'Why not just restlessness?'_

_'Because, while serving Ringleader, you were rewarded by seeing your best friend in all the world, Velma, again. But somehow, this created some sort of psychological dependence for the reward over time. And you know what? In your heart of hearts, you would do _anything_ to make that happen again. Do you want to know why? _

_'Why?' _Marcie the cultist asked cautiously.

_'Simple. Because being with Velma is more important to you than being with Ringleader.'_

_Blasphemy! _she reflexively thought. But, she grudgingly admitted, she couldn't fool herself.

_Was it true? _she thought. _Is my desire for being with Velma stronger than my desire to serve my master?_

_'So what if it is?' _the analytical shrugged_. 'Are you gonna sit here and suffer because the grand high muckety-muck doesn't have anything for you to do tonight?'_

_'Don't say that about him,' _the cultist defended, then added, _'Wait. What are you saying?'_

_'I'm saying that you should take the bull by the horns and _do_ something about it. Be proactive, as you have been.'_

_'And do what? Stop this obsession I'm having by going out into the night and stealing something that reminds me of V? A tad creepy, don't you think?'_

_'But I _didn't_ think it. _You_ did.'_

_'But _you're_ me. I'm...myself.'_

_'Exactly, and in the end...'_

"You can't fool yourself," she said to herself aloud.

She awoke, sitting up in her bed. The shakes had subsided for now, but they were replaced by a calm, baleful chuckle and a feverish look in Marcie's eyes. Her heart danced in anticipation of what her twisted logic was about to compel her to do.

The arrogance, she saw, the sheer, desperate _gall_ of the act, at once, gave her a satisfactory, if temporary, way to end her compulsion, and a terrifying thrill deep within her.

Yes. She would strike out, without Ringleader knowing, and would combine both the mission _and _the reward into one sweet whole that would not only give her solace and contentment, if just for a little while, but, if she was very lucky, the beginnings of a kick-ass secret shrine to a certain bookish girl.

The room was a pocket universe of loneliness, inactivity and quiet darkness, with a large, four-poster bed dominating its center of mass.

In the daylight, Velma Dinkley's empty bedroom was a time capsule, marking the life of a _somewhat_ typical teenaged daughter, no less a display than any of the others in her parents' museum, but at night, it was as still and silent as a forgotten tomb.

Both parents, Dale and Angie, were as anxious to learn about the condition of their daughter, as any parent would. But the Dinkleys' attitudes and world views about parenting were not as typical as other parents in regards to Velma. Although they were mindful of Velma's behavior and habits, they were also incredibly encouraging when it came to them. They rarely held things from her, allowing her to experience life, if only at a pace that they approved of.

This sudden "field trip" was just the latest of such experiences. Even Velma would admit that even though they could be parentally intrusive, to the point of prison warden-standards, sometimes, they also respected her maturity and judgment, and gave her more freedom and latitude than any other adults that she knew.

Despite the worry that would occasionally haunt their home life, like an unwelcome spirit, Dale and Angie would trust in her again, and in the meantime, like a calming, exorcising ritual, they would care for all of the personal effects in their daughter's life, and dust the place biweekly, until her expected, and oft-hoped for, return.

If, however, anyone was close enough to the window that night, he or she could have heard the soft bubbling and hiss of carefully applied acid making short work of the single-pane glass closest to the locks, before flowing down to devour them, as well.

The window slowly slid up in quiet increments and Marcie slipped a bell-bottomed leg through the window. Muscles taut and holding her body on the window sill in as quiet a manner as possible, she found herself grateful for those erstwhile gymnastics lessons, as she cautiously stretched her outstretched foot to the floor, putting pressure on it to test for the incriminating creak.

Satisfied that none were forthcoming, Marcie crept into the interior of the bedroom.

She took out a small bag, and was about to begin rooting around in the dresser drawers, when something forced her to stop where she was. Not the warning sound of an approaching guardian, or the errant sound of a misplaced step or move. Just the gentle power of nostalgia.

She looked around and almost forgot how much she loved coming here. And although the room was abandoned, she swore she could feel something, a vibration, a presence, in the room. The spirit of clever, conscious, teenaged energy given form, and the name, Velma.

As she carefully began to walk to the other side of the room, one of her hands brushed along one side of the dark bed, and she flinched from the sudden bittersweet touch. But it was too late. The memories came to her as a fast a school of piranha, stripping away the questionably therapeutic purpose of her coming here, just as quickly.

The friendly invitations to come over, from sleep-overs, as little girls, to just relaxing and delighting in the other's company, as teens. Marcie wrapped herself deep in the remembrance of that wonderful feeling of sitting, or even better, _lying_, under the private shelter of the bed's broad canopy.

And then the regret came to her, in waves. The regret of taking things for granted, specifically.

She was lying on that very bed, the last time she saw her, and thoughts of an eminent future without Velma, never occurred to her. She had to correct that mistake tonight.

Marcie put down her bag and quietly slipped onto the made surface of the bed. Patiently, she extended every sense she possessed to silently tap into the magical echo that remained of her friend.

She crawled slowly, so as not to disturb the blankets or sheeting, and stretched herself across the length of the bed, like an indolent housecat, luxuriating in the soft, well-worn firmness that was so familiar to her young body.

She lay her head on the pillow, as she had on the last day Velma had left her room. She hadn't taken notice then, but now, she turned to her side and brought her face close to the pillow case.

It was faint, a mere ghost of a scent, now, but she could still breathe the perfume of Velma's bobbed and bowed hair in the linen.

It was just too much. The feelings were too deep. They were only moments of awaken memory, but they felt like her hallucinatory rewards, only a thousand times sharper. She felt like a junkie given a mainline of pure cocaine. It electrified her, but it also electrocuted her, as well.

The desire for Velma to come home hit her like a physical blow that she could no longer endure. The loss flowed up from her guts, touched her broken heart, and transmuted it all into her curling up into a tortured ball, and quietly weeping upon the pillow.

It was a fool errand, she realized. Nothing she could take from this room could ease the ache she felt at her friend's leaving, or equal the love she felt for her all of those years.

The rewards didn't feel like rewards anymore. They felt hollow and manufactured. Cheap and distracting. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew coming here would ultimately crush her, and she didn't care. This was what she needed. The reality. The bracing, cleansing reality of pure emotional connection, and although part of her railed at the heretical thought, she solemnly came to the conclusion that Ringleader couldn't grant these falsehoods to her anymore.

So deep in thought and epiphany was she, that she hadn't heard the bedroom door slowly open, or see it, as her back was to it. Nor noticed a shocked and cautious Angie Dinkley standing in the threshold, staring at the indistinct figure in her daughter's bed, an ice bucket, in hand.

"Velma?" she whispered.

_Fool! _Marcie's mind screamed at herself. She twisted around and bolted off the bed, her standing orders clear. _Do not let anyone capture you! Escape to collect for the church another day!_

"Marcie? What are you doing here?" Angie asked, confused, but still on alert.

Marcie's adrenaline levels spiked and her brainwashed mind went into automatic. She was recognized by an enemy of the church and would be reported on soon. This woman would threaten the stability and good works of the cult, and, just as worrisome, would stop her from being with Velma, in any capacity, and that simply would not do.

Instead of turning away and heading for the open window, Marcie slowly approached Angie, estimating the surprised woman's possible worth in a fight and finding it comically lacking. She could take on this interloper easily!

Fingers clawed for a terminal grasp, Marcie let her emotions ride the crest of the adrenaline rush, intoning robotically, "For every mission you finish for me, a day with your friend you will spend with thee..."

"I don't know what that means, dear," Mrs. Dinkley warned in her unflappable, matronly voice. "but I'm afraid you're not leaving until I get some answers."

Marcie wasn't hearing any of it. She pivoted her feet and launched into a charge, hands reaching for Mrs. Dinkley's plump throat.

Mrs. Dinkley suddenly lifted the ice bucket, angled it accurately, for the few seconds she had, and splashed frigid water and half-melted ice full on Marcie, stopping the surprised girl in her wet, wide-eyed tracks.

The shocking, agonizing cold took her breath away, her adrenaline levels jumped into overload, but instead of reacting more defensively in an effort to avoid the sensations, her body began to tense from the uncomfortable stimuli, and before she could consciously form any kind of tactic to get her out of her situation, Marcie found the floor flying up to her face.

Then merciful darkness.


	7. 7

7~

She felt prone.

The previous darkness that she fell into, became a gradually lifting gray fog, as she ascended into damp consciousness.

Marcie's eyes, even bespectacled, were unfocused as she opened them and tried to get her bearings. Head starting to clear, she recognized the trappings of a living room, a couch, and a full-figured woman sitting by her, watching her recover.

"Mrs. Dinkley?" Marcie managed to say, but her body was as a ragdoll's, immobile and weak from her earlier psychosomatic withdrawal symptoms at home.

"Yes, dear," Angie said quietly. "I'm here, and you're in my house."

"I...am?"

"Yes, sweetheart. Now, why is that?"

Marcie stared past the woman blankly. She couldn't understand why she was in Mrs. Dinkley's home at such an hour, or in her current condition, and when she tried to remember, she just couldn't access the memory.

"Why am I so wet?" Marcie asked.

"I found you in Velma's room," Angie explained. "and, I'm afraid, you became quite unhinged, so I splashed you with the melted water from my ice bucket. And then, you passed out."

"I did?" Marcie pinched and rubbed the tiredness from her eyes. "I don't remember anything except being so tired that day after school. It was so hot that day. I went into an alley to cool off and take a nap. Then, I saw Ringleader…"

"The hippy criminal on the news?"

"Yes, and then, nothing."

"Hmm...It sounds like you might have had your memories suppressed somehow," pondered Angie. "With your permission, I'm going to try and put you under, so I can bring these missing memories back. Will you let me?"

Hypnosis? Marcie wondered. It reminded her distantly of when she was invited to Velma's tenth birthday party. Although she was thoroughly entertained, the girl felt it a bit far-fetched when Mrs. Dinkley had supposedly hypnotized her husband to bark whenever he heard the number 10.

Hence, the hilarity, when they all would sing 'Happy Birthday' to little Velma, and her father would bark whenever his daughter would answer the question of how old she was.

No harm was done, there were even scientific papers written about the subject, and in the back of her mind, little Marcie _did _wonder how Mrs. Dinkley was able to control another mind so thoroughly without the use of chemicals.

In any event, Marcie needed answers and she needed closure. If hypnotic suggestion was the key to her finding them, what had she to lose?

"Of course, Mrs. D," Marcie allowed. "I trust you. I have to know what happened to me."

"All right, dear."

Marcie watched Mrs. Dinkley reach towards her chest and hold up a golden medallion, engraved with the Masonic symbol of the Egyptian pyramid centered with the All-seeing Eye. She took it from around her neck and held it swaying gently above Marcie's face.

"Now, I want you to relax and watch the pretty necklace," Angie instructed calmly.

"Okay..."Marcie said, already exhausted.

"See the triangle in the middle? I want you to watch it swinging, back and forth. Keep your eyes on it."

"Okay..."

After a few minutes of quiet, Angie ventured to ask the girl, softly, "Are you relaxed, Marcie?"

"Yesss..."Marcie droned, barely awake.

"Back and forth...back and forth...back and forth."

Marcie's perception floated in the cottony twilight between the conscious and subconscious, and the only sound she could utter was a whispering "Uhhhh..." She was ready.

"Listen and understand," Angie quietly told her. "Your mind is like a book. Everything you do and say is written in the pages of this book. Now, I want you to turn those pages back in your mind. Look at _every_ page in your mind until you reach the page of you in the alley with this Ringleader."

Marcie's brain obeyed. Unconnected thoughts slowly began to detach from the murk of her absent-mindedness and bobbled back up to the surface of her mind, clarifying, gradually, as they ascended.

"_Look at every page in your mind…"_

The breaking into Velma's room, her talks with Daisy, her father, and even Ringleader in his "church". Those thoughts congealed together to form moments…

"_Look at every page in your mind…"_

From those clumps of moments, they gradually amalgamated into ever more coherent events…The thefts. _So many brazen thefts_.

"_Look at every page in your mind…" _

And from those events, after long minutes of stumbling recollection, sorting and resorting the times of her illicit doings, comings and goings, Marcie finally took a cleansing breath and could remember her run-in with the wretched Ringleader in the dark alley.

"Ringleader! He hypnotized me in the alley! He made me a member of his cult! I...I can remember, now," Marcie said gratefully, her memory strengthening more readily. "And I'm starting to feel like myself again. Thank you, Mrs. D."

Angie swung up and casually caught her medallion before putting back around her neck. "You're welcome, dear. I'm glad I could help. Now, do you remember why you were in Velma's room? In case you didn't know, she left with her other friends to go on a field trip a few weeks ago."

"I know, Mrs. D.," Marcie wearily said, as she turned to sit up on the couch. "and the reason I was in her room was because…I missed her."

Marcie felt more red-faced shame in her reasons for the break-in, than for the break-in, and the more she thought about what she said, as hard as it was _to_ say, the more pathetic she felt under Mrs. Dinkley's quizzical gaze.

"I'm sorry. I…wasn't thinking clearly, what with the brainwashing and all," she continued with some effort. "It's just that she's my friend, and for weeks, I just couldn't understand why she would just up and leave like that. I tried to be understanding and patient, but...when is she coming back?"

Mrs. Dinkley sat still on her stool and ruminated what she heard, her normally upbeat manner becoming visibly diminished. But, if she had any anger towards Marcie for her transgressions, it was replaced with quiet sadness.

"I don't know, Marcie," she said in a voice that to Marcie, sounded almost like defeat. "I suppose we're in the same boat. Dale and I trust Velma to do the right thing, and I know she has a good head on her shoulders, but…maybe we were wrong. Maybe we should have been more controlling and said no to her regarding the trip."

Marcie had no inkling about parenting and wasn't about to shoot her mouth off and pretend that she did. So she simply bowed her head in commiseration and said, "I guess, Mrs. D."

Perhaps because the topic felt too hard to discuss and she wanted to change the subject, Mrs. Dinkley sighed, perked up and asked in a gossipy voice, "So tell me, how did you feel when you became an evil, brainwashed pawn of a criminal puppetmaster?"

"Free. Powerful," Marcie said. "Like I could do anything I wanted."

"Did taking things from people make you feel powerful?" Mrs. Dinkley continued, as though she were a psychiatrist trying to get to the root of some deep neurosis.

"It did," Marcie admitted. "But if that was so, then why I was so shaken when I…"

"Went into Velma's room? You may know the answer to that better than I, dear."

Marcie sighed. "I guess my mind was telling me what it felt like to lose something important. Like the townspeople losing their property. V's my best...my _only_ friend in the world, and I guess, because I've been so used to Velma being around, that when she left, I was really hung up on it."

Mrs. Dinkley looked deeply at Marcie. She had known her a long time, almost like family, but this was the first time she saw the teen with truly sympathetic eyes.

"Well, when we've been with people we care about for a long time, we sometimes live in extremes, and tend to either take them for granted, or see them as a crutch to get through the day," she said. "By the by, why do you always say that."

"Say what?"

"That Velma is your _only_ friend. I'm sure you've known quite a few people in your time. Could _they_ be your friends?"

Marcie looked to the side, afraid to show the vulnerability. She knew who Mrs. Dinkley was talking about. Them. Velma's _other_ friends.

"Maybe," Marcie mumbled begrudgingly.

"Am _I_ a friend?" Mrs. Dinkley asked out of the blue.

That caught Marcie completely off-guard. _Unfair, Mrs. D! _she thought._ How could you think otherwise? _

"Of course, Mrs. D!" Marcie said quickly, to squash any offense, as well as to bolster her own defense. "You've been like a mother to me! When I lost my own mother, you were _always_ nice to me. I just meant that Velma's...uh…" She lowered her head again.

Mrs. Dinkley chuckled perceptively. "More like you. I understand, Marcie. I didn't mean to put you on the spot like that."

Marcie exhaled relievedly. "No, Mrs. D. I _do _think of you as a friend, but I certainly didn't act like one by breaking into your home tonight. I had a choice not to do it, but I did it, anyway. There's no excuse for that. And you're right...about earlier. I suppose I took her leaving me too personally. Almost like I've been-"

"Pining for her?"

Marcie snapped a look of stone-faced fear at her, any pretense at wondering if she knew how she felt about her daughter fled from her, like her courage.

But Angie Dinkley just masterfully diffused the tension by smiling that perky, yet worldly and enigmatic smile of hers.

"Marcie, your friendship with Velma is such a wonderful and precious thing, and the most important thing about it, is that my daughter knows it is, too. It's not a weakness, but a strength. I know how hard it will be to wait until she comes back. I'm her mother and I miss her something terrible, too."

"Then I how do I...I mean, how do _we_ deal with it, Mrs. D?"

"With faith, love...and good long-distance phone service," she quipped with a chuckle, but then added, more seriously, "I'm glad that my daughter has you for a friend, Marcie. You came and told me the truth, so you have nothing to apologize for, and I have nothing to forgive, but if you really want to honor Velma's friendship, then you must do your best to stop this Ringleader and help return all of the things that were stolen."

A thunderbolt struck her from within. _Not just for justice, but for Velma_.

Never had Marcie thought of having that as a motivation before. For the first time that night, she fixed her host with a determined glint as hard as carbon steel.

"I swear on my friendship with Velma, that I _will_ shut Ringleader down," Marcie vowed, her mind already trying to make up for lost time, processing on the possible connection of the few clues she had collected so far.

Mrs. Dinkley calmly stood up from her stool. "Thank you, dear. I'll give you a ride back to your house. It's too late at night for me to give her a call, but if you ever get the chance to talk to her over your computer, tell her that her parental units said hello, and that we miss her very, very much."

Marcie gave the kind woman a grateful hug. "Thank you, Mrs. D. I knew _you_ would understand."

In good spirits and turning away to leave the living room, Mrs. Dinkley chirped, "Oh, sweetie, think nothing of it. I was young once, myself."

As she watched Angie Dinkley get the keys to the family station wagon, Marcie gave her a reverent look.

Once again, without complaint of inconvenience, she had become the mother Marcie had always needed.

The damaged cardboard box sat on the table in Marcie's lab, next to the clay fragment of smoke bomb sphere she found in Crystal Cove Mall. She placed them together in the hopes that she could find sense in them, but so far, nothing.

"What was it Velma said I could do, last time we webcammed?" Marcie asked herself while staring at the objects and brooding on her stool. "Gather evidence to build a case I could send to the sheriff? I'd better. Accusing Ringleader of anything short of jaywalking, without hard proof, isn't going to fly with Sheriff Stone, no matter how incompetent he is. He's still a fellow Crystal…_Cover?_ _Covian?_ _Covite?_…until proven guilty."

She sat some more, feeling that there was a connection with the box and the broken sphere that would tell her the secrets of the universe, if she were persistent enough.

Her eyes began to tighten. She was getting tired and staying up on a school night was a surefire way to oversleep tomorrow.

She reached over and picked up the box, turning it in her hands, not believing it would yield any answers, but, at least doing something different with the box before she turned in for the rest of the night.

"Way to go, Miss Observant," she chided herself. "Obviously the bombs that blew up Joanne's store were in these boxes. A hole in only one side? Definitely a shaped charge to focus the blast in only one direction, in this case, the front of the store. That's why the back of the store was untouched."

She scratched the back of her unkempt hair in thought. "But what does this have to do with anything?" she asked herself in frustration. "Everyone saw Ringleader blow up the store. There's no mystery about that. I can't help put him away on some rinky-dink vandalism charge. What am I missing? What's the _real_ mystery?"

Marcie gave a stretch and looked out of one of the lab's window into the night. Not a good idea, she figured, as the stars made the night sky look so tranquil.

"Well, what to do?" she sighed. "Do I spend the rest of the night wracking my brain trying to find the evidence I need? Or do I crash and try to get it all done tomorrow?"

Nothing ever got done by sleeping, her father would tell her, so the answer, to her, was clear. She went over to a counter, where a cd player sat next to her laptop. A disk was inside. She hit the Play button, and the first track of Rude Boy and the Skatastics' third album, _'The Ska's The Limit,' _came through the speakers loud and clear.

Bopping her head to the downbeat, she opened a cabinet and produced a mug, and a half empty bottle of caffeine-rich Collision Cola. Placing them on the counter next to the lab's sink, she turned on the steaming hot water to rinse the mug.

"Well, Marcie," she said, psyching herself up while washing out her cup, listening to Rude Boy's voice suddenly start to fade, and feeling her knees give way, "It's gonna be a long night."

She collapsed on the lab floor, unconscious, while Rude Boy sang on.

"Marcie!" Winslow called out from the kitchen the next morning between bites of toast. "I'm getting ready to go. Do you want me to drop you off at school?"

No answer came from anywhere in the house.

Winslow gave a cautionary glance at his watch, he had to leave. "She must have went to school early," he concluded. "Ah, that's my little hard worker. Takes after her old man."

He got into his car, closed the driver's side door and afterwards, pulled away from the house. The sound of the car accelerating down the street was the signal Marcie needed to open the door to her lab and check for any paternal sounds. None were heard.

With a sigh, she closed the door again and open the windows to let in the invigorating morning air to clear the cobwebs out of her head.

"That impromptu nap did me a world of good," she said to herself with a stretch. "And now, with some breakfast, forthcoming, I'll be ready to bring my first criminal to justice."

She walked from the lab to the rear entrance to the house pondering on the event of last night.

"Wow, the Sandman must've gave me a right hook, last night. I haven't felt that sleepy since...the day..."

Marcie stopped in her tracks, the epiphany tearing the lead cotton of ignorance from her brain by yards. The connection. It was so complete and unbending, that it shamed her for not seeing it sooner.

She looked down at her wrist.

"Joanne's bracelet. I forgot all about it. I've been wearing this thing for days, and I wasn't attacked by Ringleader...until after I wore this bracelet. I've been looking at the _wrong things _in this mystery! It's the bracelet! The _bracelet _is the clue!" she gleefully yelled in the backyard to no one in particular.

She ran into the kitchen, eager to whip up some sandwiches and grab some orange juice to take back to the lab. Solving problems always gave her a hell of an appetite.

In the kitchen, while she began assembling the components of her sandwiches, Marcie began to think about Joanne. She gave the bracelet to her and then Ringleader attacked. He attacked Joanne in the mall, as well. Was the bracelet a connection to the both of them, somehow?

Was the bracelet something that she had that he wanted? A quick examination showed nothing out of the ordinary, a thin, golden band topped with a ruby-like gem. If he wanted it, then why didn't he just take it from her when she was at his mercy? It didn't add up. There was definitely some connection, but it was just too subtle for these easy lines of questions to uncover.

Before she could ask herself another question, the doorbell chimed.

She stopped her sandwich making and walked towards the front of the house with growing unease. What if it was Ringleader, or one of his minions? What if he somehow found out that she had broken his mental hold on her, and came to her, personally, to reestablish it?

Marcie crept up to the front door quietly, desperate not to give herself away.

The doorbell rang again.

Nervously picking up an umbrella from its stand by the side of the door, she breathed out, and swiftly opened the front door. The umbrella's pointed end was jabbed into the face of a postman, who roared in pain and frustration.

Marcie lowered the bumbershoot and gave a good look around the front lawn for reinforcements. None were there. She then gave an apologetic look at her victim.

"I'm so sorry, mister. I thought you were somebody else."

Holding the high side of his face, the government worker growled, "I feel sorry for that 'somebody else.' Here!"

He hefted a package at her, roughly the size of a small TV set, and wrapped in brown paper and tape, which she accepted, sheepishly.

"Thank you, sir." Marcie said to the mailman's back as he stomped back to his truck, curses and unflattering comments about her ancestry filling his mind.

As he drove off, Marcie looked at the package, inspecting it for anything untoward. A block of writing off one corner of the parcel caught her eye. It was addressed to her, from, of all people, Daisy Blake.

She brought it inside and put the package on the dining room table. Tearing the wrapping away, Marcie saw a note drift down to the table's surface. She picked it up and read the missive.

_'Dear Marcie,_

_Picked this up while I was diving around Darrow U, the other day. Can't believe they'd throw this out just because they've got something else that's shinier. I saw some scientists use these in their classes. Figured a whiz kid like you would have a use for it. _

_ Enjoy!'_

Marcie cleared the rest of the wrapping off to reveal a twenty-year old spectroscope. It resembled a computer made to a scale more comfortable for a kindergartener, a small, boxy monitor sitting on top of an equally small, thick, rectangular control base.

Despite its age, Marcie's face automatically beamed with an eager smile. If it worked, it could simplify her chemical analysis work a hundredfold. She had to do something to return the favor.

It was then that her mind came up with the perfect gift. Thinking back, she remembered her little chat with the other Blake Sisters back at _Groovitations_, and wondered in cool dread if they ever succeeded in dragging Daisy down into Ringleader's lair.

Taking her cell phone out of her wool jacket pocket, she tensely dialed the Blake Mansion. After two rings, Daisy's voice came clear from the other side of the receiver. As a recording.

After the message beep, Marcie said in response, "Daisy, you were right. Your sisters _were_ acting strangely, because they've been brainwashed by Ringleader. I'm free of him, now, but you'll have to watch your back until I can get to them. I think ice cold water is the key to shocking them out of their brainwashing, so I'll try that. Oh, yeah, I got your gift just now. I love the spectroscope. I hope it works. Bye for now."

She then pocketed the phone and carried the instrument into the kitchen, so she could finish making her breakfast and tackle the rest of the day.

As Rude Boy was jamming on his second run on her cd player, Marcie, mouth full of food and drink, was examining the bracelet with a magnifying glass under a bright, adjustable lamp.

So far as she could ascertain, nothing looked amiss, and despite her happiness at being the proud owner of her own spectroscope, she wished she had an electron microscope thrown into the mix to help her with the examination.

She slowly twisted the bangle slowly between her fingers, trying to angle as much light and magnification into the band, as possible. If there was a link between Ringleader and Joanne, it had to be in the jewelry somewhere.

Marcie stopped her angling when she thought she saw something different in the color of the inside of the band, where the wrist would rest. She thought that it was a distortion caused by the magnifier, but she saw it again when she brought the bracelet up closer to the lamp, a dulling of the band's interior surface in comparison to the overall gilded gleam of its outside.

"I guess the metal wasn't really gold at all, just some fake metal discolored by sweat, probably," she mumbled to herself. "Well, maybe there's something in the discoloration. It wouldn't hurt to check."

Reaching over to a plastic container filled with tall handled cotton swabs, she plucked one out, ran a little water over one of the absorbent heads, and carefully rubbed off a sample of the dull patina inside the band.

She then walked over to her spectroscope, pressed its On button, and thought a silent prayer that it still worked.

The smallish monitor flickered to grainy life, as a green-tinted screen with archaic, blocky graphics, jumped, pulsed and eventually steadied into reasonable resolution.

Marcie, breathing relievedly, tapped the tiny, specialized keypad to place the instrument's dated computer to its new settings, smeared the sample into the control base's miniature entry chamber, and then slid it into the device's still surviving micro-furnace.

Crossing her fingers, she heard the heating element inside buzz as it burned the sample, transforming the once solid matter into a contained gas, that was then lit, and its light, beamed, so that its unique emission line spectrum could be scanned by the unit's hearty photosensors array to determine what the sample was made of.

A dark green graph appeared on the screen, a horizontally-banded bar with the odd line radiating from certain bands to denote specific elements that made up the sample.

Marcie peered closely at the screen, attempting to get used to the visual quality, or lack thereof, took out a small note pad from her jacket, and thankfully scribbled the elements displayed. She then cleared the screen of the graph, and, after taking another bit and another swig, went to her laptop and called up Goggle.

Typing the list of elements into the search bar brought forth web page summary after web page summary of related subjects. Some giving information about the individual elements, others detailing chemical compositions that had some of the elements present. Marcie resigned herself to read them all.

Two hours into the search, Marcie stopped and rubbed her eyes.

"I can't believe I'm play hooky, for this," she groused while closing another web site and returning to the current Goggle page. "I thought my Goggle-fu was strong."

She inched the screen further down, and was about to clean her work area and get some more o.j., when a lax glance at the page flashed something to her. It happened so quick, she stopped and had to scan around the articles featured there to find it again, but when she did, she smiled to rival the morning sun.

The headline of the summary was innocuous-looking enough, since the article the web page carried came from an old newspaper story from years back. All of the elements' names that could fit the summary were shown in bold letters beside a single word. _Snooxex_. But the three words Marcie focused on in that abridged headline made everything she went through in the past few days worth it.

Dr. Joanne Barlow.


	8. 8

8~

In Darrow University, there was a sorority that had something of a reputation.

Lambda Epsilon Gamma, or Gamma House, as it was known around and outside of campus, was, to use the euphemism of the more conservative and wary students, citizens and faculty, lively.

It was the best way they could describe its occupants without sinking down to the house's level, they believed.

A shabby-looking, stocking-draped den of bad landscaping and questionable mores, occupied by the feminine cream of the slacker crop, the sorority's claim to dubious fame was its contribution to gender equality by being just as body-conscious, lustful, and academically underachieving as their wrestling-obsessed, male counterparts at Mu Gamma Tau on the other side of campus.

Historically, weekdays were, oft times, the most eventful, and weekends were, by far, the noisiest the house could become, bringing, on either end of the week, the campus police, concerned faculty, or, as it was mostly the case, randy, male members of the student body, through its doors.

This day, the lounge of Gamma House was graced by the perturbed presence of the elderly, diminutive, but by no means, milquetoast, dean of the university, Daniel Darrow.

"I've had it with the whole lot of you!" he addressed the small group of girls that sat, in various levels of apathy, on the curved divan. "You girls will get your act together, and uphold the good name of Darrow University, or I'll have you all bounced out of here so fast, you'll think your backsides were made of rubber!"

The threat only provoked scattered snickers from some of the girls, including one that Dean Darrow focused his ire towards.

"And that goes double for you, Teresa. Just because you're my granddaughter, doesn't mean you get to slack off. You're a Darrow. It's high time you acted like one."

"C'mon, Grandpa," she sighed. "You make it sound like Darrows never had any fun. It's college, we're young, it's inevitable."

"I'll tell you what's inevitable, young lady. Your expulsion, if you don't straighten up and fly right. It would break your mother's heart to find out that I had to kick you out of my school because you want to sully our name with these...friends of yours."

One of her friends spoke up. "I'll bet it was that stuck-up witch, Paula, who ratted us out. Just because she's got one of the highest GPA's in the school, she thinks she's in charge. She's not so clean-cut, y'know. I heard that the boys in the quad call her "Put-out Paula."

"Miss Wilcox did not tell me anything I didn't already know through the list of school complaints I've received...from everybody else." Daniel said.

"That's not what I heard, 3D."

Daniel crooked his eyebrow up at the impertinent student. "What did you call me, young lady?" he asked with ice in his voice.

"3D," she answered casually, instead of cautiously, as she should have. "Y'know? Dean Daniel Darrow? 3D?"

"I know what it means, you scamp."

"Then why did you ask me-"

He had enough. "I've had enough! You listen to me. All of you. If I hear one more complaint about this..._house_, if I see one more failing grade, or one more out of control party, I am going to see to it that this house's charter is revoked, and the whole sorry lot of you are expelled."

He turned suddenly to address Daisy Blake comfortably watching the proceeding on a nearby chair.

"Miss Blake, what are you doing here?"

"Oh, I'm just visiting a friend, Dean Darrow. I'll be leaving shortly."

"See that you do. Just because you family donates a great deal to this university, doesn't mean you have time to cavort with this college riff-raff. You don't need their bad influences rubbing off on you."

"Yes, sir, Dean Darrow, sir. Thanks for the advice."

He walked back towards the front door, but gave the girls a warning glance before he left. "Remember what I told you troublemakers. One more time and I'll shut you down. No one outwits Danny Darrow!" Then he left.

As soon as the door closed, all of the girls gave a simultaneous Bronx cheer and laughed off the encounter.

"Ol' 3D's always good for a laugh," chuckled a heavy-set teen in a varsity sweater that read "Darrow." "Boy, he'd bust a button if he knew we were going to cheat on our psych exam."

"Brunhilde's right. He shouldn't worry about our grade point average dropping any lower after we ace that next psych test," said a lean, sexy brunette with clever eyes who went by the sorority name Minx. "Speaking of which, congratulations are in order. To our dear friend, Daisy Blake, who tirelessly fished through a ton of dumpsters to find the test answers for us. At our next rager, we're definitely giving you a toast."

Daisy stood from her seat and gave a stretch. "Thanks, guys. It's the least I could do. You guys saved my tail a bunch of times when I dumpster dived on university grounds, and you distracted the campus police long enough for me to make my get-away."

Minx smiled. "That's cool. Besides, we always thought you and your sisters would be great for Gamma House. We've always prided ourselves on being underachieving slackers, but when you're so underachieving, you can't even make the qualifications to be _accepted_ in Gamma House, that's when we knew that you would have been perfect here.

"Aww, you really mean it?" Daisy gushed. "Thanks, you guys. Anytime you need something from me, you just let me know. Well, I gotta scoot. I'm gonna grab something to eat at Campus Burger, and then I gotta get in touch with a friend of mine. She left a message on my cell phone, but I couldn't answer it in class. See ya."

Daisy strolled across the weedy walkway to her car, parked in front of the sorority house, taking out her cell phone and inputting the command to play back messages.

She took out her car keys, while listening to Marcie's message, which, in the end, had confused her as much as it dismayed her. Brainwashing? Ice water?

Daisy shook her head, trying to make sense of what the girl had said. She had just made it to the driver's side door before Dawn and Dorothy appeared behind her, unheard or seen.

"Guys!" Daisy yelped in surprise. "Don't sneak up on me like that. Almost gave me a heart attack."

"Sorry, Daisy," Dawn said.

"We wouldn't want that," Dorothy added. "Who was on the phone? It sounded like Marcie."

That stuck Daisy as odd. She had thought that she was the only Blake who had any dealings with Fleach. "Yeah, she left me a message. I didn't know that you knew Marcie, too."

Dawn shrugged. "Yeah, we met once or twice."

"You guys need a ride somewhere? I'm on my way to Campus Burger for a bite. Wanna come?" asked Daisy, not noticing how closely her two sisters' positions in front of her resembled a flanking maneuver.

"Oh, that's alright, sis," Dorothy told her with an innocent smile. "We rode to school with Delilah."

"Where _is_ Delilah? I wanted to talk to all of you about something."

"Oh, she's around," Dawn said, glancing around the general area. "Why don't you tell us, now, since we're here and all."

Daisy leaned against the car door with a pensive look about her. "Okay. You guys know that I've noticed you sneaking out of the house late at night. I know you want to keep it a secret, but if you're getting into something that will get you into trouble, you have to stop. I won't tell Mom or Dad, I promise, but you have to come clean. I'll understand."

Her two sisters gave enigmatic smiles, glanced knowingly to each other and shrugged.

Dawn spoke in a sing-song voice. "You won't believe us."

"I will. Just tell me."

"Okay. We sneak out at night and take up collections from the selfish people of Crystal Cove, all for the glory of our spiritual leader," Dorothy finished.

Daisy rolled her eyes. "Wait. So you're telling me that you guys are doing community work…for a church? Don't kid a kidder, okay? You know darn well that the only church we ever go to has the words "toga" and "party" in it."

Daisy turned around and opened her door, stepped in, and started the car.

"If you don't want to tell me, as your _sister_, fine," she conceded indignantly. "But there's no guarantee that I won't tell Mom and Dad about this. They have to know sometime."

The chloroform rag came around her face so swiftly, she didn't react for a full two seconds before she tried to lean forward against the strength of the arm that clamped the rag to her.

Fingers desperately clawed and pulled against the offending hand, and Daisy worked and struggled so frantically, she taxed the oxygen she already had in her lungs when the rag appeared.

She reflexively breathed in, smelling the pungent chemical as it began to steal her lucidity as effectively as the sister attacking her help steal from homes in the dead of night.

Daisy looked at Dawn and Dorothy, imploringly, from the closed car window, wondering why in the world were they smiling, waving, and pushing the car door closed, when they should have been running to get help.

Her wondering soon became a distant concern, as Daisy's eyes finally closed and she fought no more. Delilah, in the back seat, pulled the rag away from her sister's face, only to have the car's steering wheel take its place, as Daisy's head fell against it, setting off a sustained blow from the horn.

Dawn opened the driver's side door and pushed Daisy over. She tipped over onto the front passenger seat.

"I told you you wouldn't believe us," Dawn sang slyly.

Dorothy opened the front passenger side door, reached in and pulled Daisy fully over to the passenger seat, as Dawn stepped into the driver's seat.

She found Daisy's phone between the two of them. Picking it up, she gave it to Delilah, who pressed the message playback.

As they listened to Marcie's warning, they became simultaneously stone-faced in the face of this sudden turn of events. The church was threatened. _Ringleader_ was threatened.

"We can't call our master, now," Dorothy said, as she got into the rear passenger seat next to Delilah.

"That's true," Dawn agreed. "He's in the middle of planning a daylight heist and can't be disturbed."

"That's okay, girls," Delilah told them, as she began dialing on the confiscated phone. "I know who to call."

Thick gloved hands moved with practiced grace over the trays of open-ended capsules that sat in airless readiness inside of the clear, cubicle vacuum chamber that was rigged in Marcie's lab.

She had been preparing and creating more of her specialty capsules throughout the late morning and early afternoon, in preparation for the possible, if not inevitable, showdown with Ringleader.

"This next batch of Insta-ice should ready to go," she said, as a way to calm her hands, as she poured the blue liquid into the top-end of the capsules, carefully filling them to the brim before vacu-sealing the batch.

Finished, Marcie slipped her slender hands out of the bulky, interior gloves, which were attached to ringed, silicon seals and bolted to the inside of the chamber. Making the actual chemicals always seemed easier than weaponizing them, and she gave a exhale at another job done.

She was about to make a list of needed chemicals she was beginning to run low on, when her cell phone rang on a nearby counter.

She reached over and answered it, wondering who would call her at this time of the day. Maybe it was Daisy with a reply to her earlier message.

"Hello," answered Marcie.

"Is this Marcie Fleach?" came the woman's voice in reply.

"Yes, this is she."

"Oh, thank goodness! Marcie, it's me, Joanne."

This was a surprise to Marcie. "Oh, hi, Joanne. How are you?"

"Not so good. I just got a call from that Ringleader," Joanne fretted. "He says that because I stood up to him, he's going to do worse than what he did to my shop at the mall, to me! I want to call the police, but I'd feel a lot safer doing that if you were around."

Marcie paused for a moment, looking around the lab. "Hmm. I've got a few things to finish up in my lab and then I'll be free. Where do you want to meet?"

"I'm at the Crystal Cove Gym and Spa. I have a membership there. I'll leave word with the receptionist that I'm expecting you. Just mention my name to her and she'll let you in."

"I'll be there, Joanne. Don't worry."

"Thank you, Marcie. Thank you."

The call ended and Marcie gave a watchful glance to a large thermal shoulder bag, sitting on the floor, like the ones used to carry around copious amounts of cold drinks to events. It was zipped closed and was bulging.

Almost time to launch her attack, and bring a church to its knees.

The gymnasium part of the business greeted Marcie with the unfamiliar sounds of exercise machines moving smoothly, lifted, assembled, or lowered weights clanking together, and the overall feelings of low self-esteem, high self-esteem and the unmistakable aura of ego-driven competition amongst the customers.

Marcie ungainly hefted her silvery shoulder bag, and walked up to the receptionist's desk.

The moment she saw and recognized the woman, Marcie had to ask, "Weren't you the receptionist I saw on that field trip to Creationex?"

The woman couldn't place Marcie's face, but remembered the event.

"Creationex? Oh, yeah. I moonlight there sometimes. Weren't you there when that guy got caught by security for stealing that prototype?"

"I was the one who made that happen," Marcie said proudly.

"No kiddin'? Well, you won't find _anything_ that exciting here, just people trying to impress everybody else. So whatcha here for? You wanna join?"

"Not really. I'm here to see Joanne Barlow. I was told she would be here."

The receptionist looked down at her notepad for a second or two, then lifted her head to Marcie once again.

"Oh, yeah. She's expectin' you. She's in the spa side of the building. Sauna room number two."

Marcie lifted her bag and was about to walk past the kiosk, when the woman held up a tagged key.

"Here's a locker key. The changing rooms are in the back."

Marcie took the offered key, said "Thanks," and marched through the sea of pumping iron and people running in place.

Joanne lounged on the wooden bench, enjoying both the steamed heat and the solitude. She had a mind to go over to the water bucket that stood next to the hotbox in the center of the room, and pour another ladleful of water on the hot rocks inside, releasing another soothing cloud of steam.

Her attention shifted to the sound of the sauna's door opening. Marcie, looking uncomfortable and clad in a wrap-around towel, entered, seeing Joanne wearing the same, sitting on the bench.

"Hi, there, Joanne. I got your message."

"Thanks for coming, Marcie," Joanne sighed with relief. "I don't know what to do. That Ringleader has been harassing me for days, and I don't know why."

Marcie tilted her head in mock-contemplation. "Well, I'm sure we'll think of something."

"I heard that you ran into him in an alley a few days ago. How did you manage to deal with him?"

"The same way I'm going to deal with you," Marcie said simply. "with good old fashioned detective work...Dr. Joanne Barlow."

Joanne sat up, stiffly. "Doctor? What do you mean? I don't understand."

"You will. First of all, how could you have known that I had my little run-in with Ringleader, and in an alley, of all places? I never told you that."

"When Ringleader was threatening me over the phone...he-he was gloating and he told me," Joanne answered ungainly.

"I'll bet he did," the girl said coolly. "Especially since it was what both of you wanted."

"What are you talking about?"

"First things first," Marcie told her, holding up a finger to stop Joanne's questioning. "Why did you stop by my school that day?

"I told you. To thank you for watching over me when Ringleader was destroying the mall."

Marcie gave Joanne a cynical glance. "Wow, booby-trapped jewelry. When you care enough to send the very best."

Joanne shook from that. "Booby-trapped? What do you mean by that?"

Marcie looked behind her, saw the wall of the doorway, and leaned casually against it.

"I took the liberty of analyzing the bracelet you gave me, and I found something very interesting on the Internet. Apparently, before you were a small business owner, you used to work for a local pharmaceutical company, before it went bankrupt due to lawsuits concerning the release of a powerful new sedative that you and your team created that had a most unusual side-effect. It made those who took it become _very_ susceptible to suggestion."

"You knew that this sedative could be introduced into the body through the pores of the skin, so before the company closed down, you must have smuggled some of the old samples out, and when you started your new business, coated some bracelets from your store with it. When anyone wore the bracelet and the wrist started to sweat, the chemical would enter through the pores and drug the victim."

"Now that you have the power to make hypnotized slaves, getting them to steal for you would have been easy, except trying to control them yourself made you too exposed and risked your operation. You needed someone else to be the public face for your operation, to attract attention and suspicion away from you."

"Enter your partner, whom, I suspect, was a special effects technician, since he was the one who rigged the explosives in your store. He played the part of Ringleader, so he could control the victims, and keep the heat off of you, Joanne. Thus, you were able to use your shop to distribute free bracelets, creating more slaves, which Ringleader would program and send out to steal for the both of you."

"That's ridiculous," Joanne scoffed, waving at the girl with a dismissive hand. "All of it."

Confident in her hard-fought deduction, Marcie ignored the gesture and continued.

"I beg to differ. You see, I also noticed a tiny chip inside the costume jewelry of the bracelet. With your partner's electronics skills, it would have been easy to cut the gems in half, and then bug every bracelet with a small homing device that he could track, using his van, so he would know when somebody wore it, and where they were most vulnerable."

"That's how he tracked _me_ down. And that's why you came to my school, Joanne, to tie up a loose end and get rid of a threat. Me."

"You're talking nonsense," the woman derided in a noticeably higher register than normal. "There was nothing wrong with that bracelet. It was a gift. Besides, why did he blow up my shop, if that's where this so-called _operation _was located?"

Marcie shrugged. "My guess is that both of you caught wind that a parent was getting too close to linking your bracelets as the likeliest cause as to why their kids were acting so hippy-dippy, these days, since it was probably known that they had received bracelets from you, hours or days before. So the attack at the mall was more than just a heist. It was misdirection meant to keep the public's focus squarely on Ringleader."

"And what makes you think that I was partners with that...that criminal, anyway?" Joanne asked in a visibly nervous titter.

"When he blew up your store, you were caught in the blast," Marcie explained. "When I went to help you, I turned you over and felt something padded underneath your clothes. At the time, I thought you were just a chunky woman in a _really_ bad girdle, but when I saw you again at school, you looked way thinner."

"Then it hit me. You must have been wearing protective clothing that day, meaning you knew that Ringleader was going to blow up your shop ahead of time. You _wanted_ to be hit by that blast, to make his attack on you look more convincing. If you were willing to take that kind of risk, you either had to be working for him, or with him."

Joanne got up off the bench in an irritable huff, standing in a posture of challenge towards Marcie.

"He's not my partner, all right?" she yelled, all pretense at civility, gone. "Maybe what went on in the mall, that day, was just a coincidence."

Marcie crossed her arms at that, and watched her, unperturbed, by her place by the wall.

"Lady, I'm a scientist. I don't believe in coincidences. Just like I don't believe it was a coincidence that I kept getting tired whenever I wore your bracelet and sweated."

Joanne stared at Marcie for a few heartbeats, her mind no longer trying to form futile defenses, but instead, was engaged in almost bittersweet admiration for the young Miss Fleach, which was reflected by the sardonic smile that formed on the corner of her lip.

For all of the machinations of this doctor-turned-criminal, this strange, little nothing of a schoolgirl, who was in the wrong place at the right time, had figured her out, laid her schemes bare, and had allowed the woman to completely underestimate her.

But the game wasn't up, yet.

"Well, frankly, I don't care what you believe," she told the girl calmly, as calmly as she strode towards her. "But I _do _care that you found out about our secret. The Blake Sisters called me earlier to warn me about you. Too bad you walked right into my steamy, little trap."

She held up a fresh bracelet. "By the way, you should be sweating quite nicely by now."

Joanne's arm lashed out with a cobra's speed and caught Marcie by the wrist, pulling it by painful degrees towards Joanne's other hand, which held the poisonous bangle that she eagerly wanted to slip on.

Marcie yanked back, the muscles in her thin arms straining in this desperate tug o' war for control of her mind. Although, she had managed a grateful stalemate where neither had gained ground, for the moment, Marcie knew it would be brief. She looked around the room, searching for anything she could grab hold of to anchor her.

Then, what she feared most had happened, she slowly began to skid forward, the soles of her bare feet beginning to give way over the moist floorboards, gradually giving Joanne the precious leverage she needed for a win.

Marcie pulled harder, but gained no new ground. Joanne simply outweighed and outmuscled her by a good measure. She _did_ say that she had a gym membership, after all.

Beside the two of them was the controlled inferno of the hotbox, and both were more than keenly aware of both its danger and its proximity, which made their fight near it, all the more frantic.

Another inch. Marcie lost more of her footing, and the girl cursed her lack of traction, until the toes of her furthermost foot bumped against the base of the water bucket next to the hotbox.

Marcie's brain switched tactics. She looked around the room again, but this time, to study it. The sauna was small, capable of seating six to eight people with any comfort, and it was angled with the narrower end sporting the two-tiered benches built into the corner of the room, and opening out towards the doorway.

If she could use the room's cramped geometry to her physical advantage, by forcing Joanne into the tapered end of the room, then she could prevail, possibly.

But that seemed like a lifetime ago, as Marcie slipped too far ahead, her balance defeated by one last furious wrench by Joanne.

Marcie's wrist was forced into the space of the bracelet, just as Marcie, seizing one chance at a distraction or a counter-attack, grabbed the ladle from the bucket and splashed water at the blistering stones closest to Joanne, blasting her face with a gout of boiling steam.

Chocking, heated mist clouded the room, obscuring the combatants' vision, but not their sense of touch, as they grappled and collided with the benches in the closed-in space of that side of the room.

As the water began to evaporate, visibility grew clearer, and Joanne emerged, using her strength to hold Marcie's bejeweled arm up high and the other arm low, so as to keep them so far apart, Marcie couldn't remove the bracelet.

Marcie tried to pull away, tried to kick free, but Joanne wisely kept her wide-legged stance to maintain her balance and leverage, following her victim, like some dance of dominance, as Marcie tried to twist and jerk loose from side to side.

Then, Joanne felt it, a slackening of the girl's body and a weak twitch from Marcie's upheld arm signaling the end of her struggles.

Joanne smiled cruelly, feeling like a spider finally overpowering feisty prey.

She let go of Marcie, and the girl's arms, like the rest of her body, went limp, yet she refused to fall to the floor. Scraps of both her energy and her will held her upright.

Joanne gave her opponent a contemptuous shove that drove Marcie back into the wall that she had been leaning against earlier. Still, she wouldn't fall, but it was clear that the fight was gone, and she stood there, helpless.

Triumphantly walking towards her, Joanne stopped in front of Marcie.

"There are no backsliders in _our_ church, missy," she said. "Now then, you will obey my…commmmmands...annnd forget...everrr trrrying to...stop...Rrringleaderrr...Whaaaaattt?"

A wave of dizziness and fatigue hit Joanne like a left hook. She had to fight to keep her balance against the wet floor and her mind tried to stay coherent enough to understand what was happening. She was losing her consciousness, slurring her words, but why?

Marcie straightened herself up and stepped away from the wall, completely lucid. She pulled the bracelet from her wrist, and then held the wrist up, like a magician revealing a trick.

Using her other hand, she felt around the raised wrist, and then, to Joanne's groggy surprise, tore a length of clear, protective cellophane tape from around it, and then did the same to the other.

_Impossible! _Joanne thought in a hazy rage_. To be outmaneuvered this badly! _

Joanne peered unsteadily towards her own wrist. Slowly, so as to keep from seeing the inevitable too quickly, she focused and finally could see her old bracelet, the one she gave to Marcie, securely on her now-medicated wrist.

"Nnnnnooo..." she moaned. Fooled by Marcie's own misdirection with the steam.

Joanne stumbled back to the benches to rest while trying to clumsily take off the bangle, but Marcie quickly leaned forward and grabbed both of Joanne's arms by the wrists, forcing her arms down and apart, so she couldn't bring them together to remove _her_ bracelet.

All the strength that Joanne once possessed mere moments earlier, left her, as she lifted her head, gritted her teeth, and tried one last time to defeat Marcie's leverage and break the hold. It felt like trying to lift a Cadillac.

Then, Joanne quieted down and becomes passive. Her head bobbed, and finally, hung low.

Marcie took a well-earned seat beside to her.

"Now," Marcie told her, exhausted, yet satisfied with her success. "I think it's time we had ourselves a chat. Just between us girls."


	9. 9

9~

The alley was quiet in the back of _Groovitations_, which didn't suit Gary and Ethan while they loitered around the steel rear entrance to the dance club, on guard duty.

Both had been recent converts, Gary first, through his dealings with an even earlier brainwashed Beatrice Cummings, and Ethan, through Gary. Now both were loyal to the cult, but at the moment, were bored out of their minds.

Something could be heard rusting around the trash-strewn alleyway, and both agreed to sharpen their wits as guards by listening to it, and deducing what was making the sounds.

"Rats," guessed Ethan.

"Raccoons," supposed Gary.

"How do you know it's a raccoon?" asked Ethan.

Gary countered. "Well, how do you know it's a rat?"

"Rats are urban. Raccoons are...suburban. Everybody knows that."

"Raccoons can be urban, too," Gary said. "They can get into trash cans."

"Yeah, in the suburbs," Ethan told him. "You've lived in Crystal Cove all your life. Have you ever seen raccoon road-kill anywhere but the suburbs?"

"Not really," Gary admitted.

"See?" Ethan said. "It's just rats."

The rustling sound on the other side of the alley started up again. The duo followed the noise, turning their collective backs on one side of the long alley.

From behind an abandoned dumpster, two rats moved halfway out of its shelter, sniffed the air cautiously, then ran further up the alley, still keeping to their side of it.

Ethan looked at Gary with clear vindication. "What did I tell you? Rats. Two of 'em. One, two-"

A hard stream of ice cold water struck Ethan and Gary's exposed necks above the collar, taking their breath away from the sheer temperature alone. The surprise and the chill made their bodies jerk and stiffen, as though they were electrocuted, and the shock of such extreme and sudden stimulation overwhelmed their brains, causing them to faint dead away.

Marcie Fleach approached the bodies from a few yards down the alleyway, a large, silver satchel slung around her sloping shoulders, and brandishing what looked like a child's _Doom Douser 5000_, a plastic, large-capacity, pressurized water rifle. And in the semi-illumination of the alley, one could see from the peeking sunlight shining through its tank, that it was fully loaded.

She looked down at her handiwork with both satisfaction and contempt.

"Three, four," she added to Ethan's rat count.

Marcie, then turned to the entrance door, pulled on the corroded handle, and stepped in.

A synthetically frosty air rose around where Gary and Ethan had lain, as ice suddenly crept around the edges of the closed steel door, filling in the space between it and the reinforced threshold, sealing it shut.

The candlelight flickered while Marcie adjusted her eyes to the gloom of the fire exit's corridor that led deep into the interior of the first floor of the building.

She kept walking forward until she reached a T-section, where the corridor ended and branched off into two smaller corridors on either side. From her days as a cultist, she knew the layout of the old dance club well enough, and took the right hallway that held the women's restrooms and led, with a left hand turn, out onto the bar, lounge and dance floor. The left hallway held the men's restrooms and exited to the same area from the opposite side.

As Marcie passed the restrooms and approached the left hand turn, she could hear quiet murmurings from a crowd up ahead and slowed her walking.

Quietly, she made it to the corridor's archway and, thankfully, could see no one posted as guards at the portal.

On her right was a poorly-lit curving stairwell, also unoccupied. That led patrons to the second floor balcony, a smaller, private lounge that sheltered the bar, and overlooked the main lounge and dance floor.

From her understanding, the staircase was the only way up or down from the balcony, but then her attention shifted back to the crowd that stood on the dance floor, blocking, from Marcie's point-of-view, what they stood around.

She needed a vantage point to spy from.

The balcony.

Marcie held her satchel and rifle close to her to minimize noise and crept cautiously towards the foot of the stairwell, then, when she was satisfied that no one had heard her, snuck quickly up the stairs.

When she reached the top, she crouched low and swept the area with both eye and water rifle. No one was there.

Relieved, Marcie put down the rifle, slipped off the shoulder bag, and laid flat on the floor, crawling while carrying and dragging her gear past dusty, cobweb-covered tables and padded chairs, until she reached the base of the railing that spanned the width of the balcony.

Peering over the top rail, Marcie had a commanding view of everything below, particularly the proceedings on the dance floor. What she saw disheartened her.

The throng of kids, fifteen strong, the whole cult membership, by Marcie's estimation, widely surrounded a space that was dominated by Ringleader, a lounge table with a steaming bucket of hot water, and the four remaining Blake Sisters, three of them holding the fourth securely.

"Guys, you don't have to do this," Daisy pleaded for what seemed like a hundred times to her, and still to no avail.

"You're gonna feel so much better after you wear the bracelet, Daisy," Dawn told her, a manically peaceful look in her eyes.

"Yeah," Dorothy added. "We resisted it, at first, when Joanne came to the university and gave out those free bracelets after her store was gone. But after Ringleader straightened it out for us, we understood the cause he was fighting for. Free love for everybody."

"The irony, of course," Delilah said. "is that love, free or otherwise, isn't free. It costs, and the ones who need it the most are the ones who could _afford_ it the most. The rich, like Mom and Dad, and after you join us, we're going to pay our parents' vault a little visit."

Daisy struggled against the combined strength of her sisters' holds, but she could break free.

Ringleader approached Daisy with an eager grin. He slipped a bracelet around her wrist and then tied a nylon cord around it, as well.

"No use resisting, darlin'," he crowed. "Joanne's just called me and told me that your nosey, little, four-eyed friend is wearing a bracelet again, and is now somewhere on the PCH, playin' in traffic. So, there's no rescue forthcoming."

He walked over to one side of the steaming bucket, trailing the cord across it.

"Bring her forward," he commanded. The sisters dragged Daisy closer to the bucket.

"No, guys! We can't steal from Mom and Dad. Think of the good times we had with them. Think of the love! Think of the trust funds!" Daisy begged as Ringleader pulled the cord tight, painfully drawing her wrist over the bucket and the rising steam.

Her exposed arm was covered with droplets from the scalding mist, but instead of yelping in pain from the heat, she felt herself relaxing in the makeshift steam bath, as drops of sweat dripped slowly from her perspiring arm.

Daisy tried to pull away from the bucket, and found that she could barely move the arm to do so. A heavy fatigue began to roll through her, so swiftly that it frightened her, but as panicked as her mind was, her body couldn't listen to its gradually lax commands.

Ringleader experimentally gave the cord some slack and her arm dipped closer to the hot water. She was just about ready.

"Move her back," he commanded her sisters.

They did as they were told, still holding her, this time to prop her up, as Ringleader approached and put on his sparkling rose-colored shades for the coup de grace.

He held up her head by her chin and intoned, "Check out my glasses."

What little will remained in Daisy made her turn her head away slightly. Ringleader just smiled at her defiance, as his thralls cheered for him. One last twitch of fight in them before the end. It was always the same, and ended the same.

Two plump, red, frigid water balloons sailed high across the vaulted ceiling of the dance club and exploded on both Ringleader and Daisy, drenching one and freeing the other from the chemical grip of the Snoozex sedative.

The splash on Daisy also caused collateral effects on her sisters from being so close. Icy droplets of water caused chilling tingles to clutch them, and they released her, as Daisy fell to her knees, damp and shivering.

Ringleader snatched the glasses from his eyes to see who had attacked him. From the direction of the balloons, when they hit, he guessed that it came from the bar.

Or the balcony...

He looked up to see an angry Marcie looking down from her height, loaded for bear.

"You're like toilet paper on my sandals, girl. I just can't seem to get rid of you," Ringleader called out to her in annoyance, masquerading as cordiality.

"Your partner felt that way, too," she called back.

Ringleader frowned. This girl was tearing through his and Joanne's secrets too quickly and deeply. She was proving to be a threat.

"So, you know, huh? And you gave Joanne the slip, apparently. Well, that's cool. It's not like you or your friend, here, are gonna leave anytime soon."

"I know," Marcie said noncommittally. "And neither will you, since I froze the back door to this place."

That brought Ringleader some pause. He couldn't see how she could freeze a door solid, and she might have been lying just to rattle him, but he also considered what it might mean to him if it were true. That door was the only was in or out, and for security, he preferred it that way, since all other exits and windows were either chained or boarded up, anyway.

"While you're thinking about what I said," Marcie continued. "you should know that I've told the Sheriff and his men where your hideout is. They should be on their way."

_I hope_,she thought.

It didn't look to Ringleader like she could do very much damage from her position on the balcony, if all she had were cold water balloons, but her mention of the law coming quickly changed things.

"Hey, maybe we can make a deal," he said smoothly, his charm and diplomacy about as false as his cult. "You're obviously smart. What do you want?"

Marcie shook her head with a bitter smile. She heard his poisonous words before. "Sorry, Ringworm. I've had my fill of illusions and false promises from you. All I want is the girl." She gestured toward Daisy.

From the corner of his eye, he could see Daisy standing up and stripping the bracelet from her arm as though it were some deadly animal she wanted to put some distance between.

"And if I refuse?" Ringleader asked, recognizing the challenge in the situation.

"Then the sheriff gets his prize."

Ringleader gave his cultists a casual glance while he posed thoughtfully, more for Marcie's benefit, than for anything else. It was obvious, however. The numbers _were_ on his side. He shrugged, and innocently put his hands behind his back, keeping their sparking out of view.

"Get her!" he commanded the crowd.

Daisy, finding her second wind, gave the water bucket a forceful kick towards the crowd, splashing scalding hot water on the closest ones.

This distracted the ones heading for the lounge, allowing Daisy to sprint past them and run, pell-mell, towards the balcony stairs.

"Up here, Daisy!" Marcie yelled, her heart in her stomach for the crazy play she attempting.

Daisy climbed at a reckless speed, and was surprised to see an armed Marcie standing at the top.

"Get behind me!" the girl yelled and Daisy ran past. They could hear the crowd below stampeding through overturned tables on their way to dragging these bothersome birds down from their perch.

Marcie reached into her wool jacket pocket and pulled out a small handful of Insta-ice capsules. Hearing a knot of kids tearing up the stairwell, she dashed the capsules against the steps, releasing the refrigerants into the stale air.

Ice began to form and swell, creating an icicle-spiked barricade that filled the width and half the height of the stairwell , and spread thin sheets of ice from its base further down the stairs, causing the closest cultists to slip and crash along it.

"Hopefully, that should hold them until the sheriff comes," Marcie breathed with some relief.

"Are you all right?" she asked her friend, as she checked both the pressure and fill gauges on her water rifle. Both were satisfactory, as was the numbing temperature that she felt through the plastic water tank of the toy.

"Yeah, I think so," Daisy answered while she crawled on all fours towards the railing. "That's what you meant about cold water in your message. It snaps you out of it."

Cultists, determined to serve their master faithfully, began clawing and scrabbling up the slick stairs. Their fingers numb and their clothing getting wet, they ignored the pain to get their hands on Marcie and overrun her position.

The two who came the closest to the barricade, surprisingly, were Dawn and Dorothy. They gritted their teeth as they grabbed onto the icicle spikes to use as handholds. Others soon caught up.

Marcie raised her rifle, looking down the sight as it pointed at the two sisters' sensitive throats. A number of squeezes on the trigger brought a torturous rain of ice water across the cultists' necks.

With cries of shock and discomfort, the girls' muscles seized up from the sudden chill, releasing their already pained holds on the spikes, allowing them to stumble down into their approaching comrades in dazed, useless heaps.

The ones who were coming up from behind their fallen sisters-in-arms, carried them back out of the stairwell, except for Delilah, who pushed her way past for both the glory of Ringleader and to avenge her sisters.

However, despite her rage, she had just as difficult a time reaching the barricade as the last two, giving Marcie the crucial time she needed to line up another debilitating shot, bringing her down.

Marcie, successfully holding her position, forced the other cultists to remove the Blakes and keep the way clear, and to think of a new way to defeat her.

Then, they suddenly stopped advancing. Marcie wanted to breath easier, but she knew that it was only a lull in the action. She could still hear them milling about below. They still wanted to tear her down from her bunker, but now they were being cautious. They were loosing too many, too fast.

"Marcie! They've got a ladder!" Daisy called from her vantage point behind the railing.

Marcie wanted to see what they were up to from where Daisy was crouched, but she couldn't risk leaving her station unmanned.

_So, they're going for a pincer maneuver to overwhelm us_, she thought._ This is going to be one hell of a skirmish_.

"Look in my bag. I've got some water balloons in there," Marcie called out. "You'll have to be my eyes and ears, and hold them off from where you are."

"Hold them off?" Daisy asked in a panic. She couldn't believe this little Rambette wanted her to engage them with her.

"Yes! I can't see them all from where I am, and I can't be in two places at once. They're going to try to overrun us from your side. Pick your shots and throw them!"

Before Daisy could sputter another word of dissent, the top of the ladder struck the railing with a sound that chilled her as thoroughly as Marcie's water balloon had.

She peered as far over the railing as she dared, and saw the spearhead, the vanguard. The biggest of the cultists starting to climb up.

Daisy felt the fear that gripped her on the dance floor as they ascended, and had to tear her attention away from them, quickly, as she reached over for the silver thermal bag.

Her hand started to lose feeling as she rooted around the ice packs and grabbed a fat water balloon. She went to the railing and gasped as the ladder squad came uncomfortably close to her.

She aimed for the head of the leader, prayed her aim was true, and dashed it downward. The balloon exploded in the squad leader's upturned face, and it was _his_ turn to gasp, as he stiffened, lost his footing, and fell back from the ladder to crash on top of the other cultists who were below, holding the ladder steady.

The rush of short-term victory and the thrill of the danger, captivated Daisy, almost robbing her of a second victory as another ladder man approached. She pulled the bag to her position and carefully lined her shot and threw, blasting another teen from the ladder.

Soon, she found her pace, and accepted her position as grenadier with grim relish. As remaining cultists cautiously began climbing the ladder, with the hope of Daisy running out of water-based munitions, she chanced to look further out past the lounge, where the kids were surging from, to the dance floor where Ringleader was safely barking orders.

Only now, he said nothing, and she could see him simply point at her from the distance.

She thought he was going to order more kids into another foolish charge up the ladder, when a ragged bolt of lightning slashed through the air and collided with the edge of the railing, momentarily blinding her.

Daisy fell back, thankful that the bolt went off to the far right and blasted between her and Marcie's position.

"What was that?" Marcie yelled to her comrade. "Was that lightning?"

Daisy, recovering from the near-hit, answered, "Yeah! We're going up against a guy that can shoot lightning? _From his hands?_"

"I saw him do that at the mall the day I ran into you. I suspect he's using a pair of homemade Tesla coils under his gloves with a portable power supply hidden in his clothes. Mind you, I think he would be better served using something more solid-state, like a projector that fires _chemically produced_ direct-current electricity."

Another lash of electricity burned across the railing as Daisy remembered the ladder squad. She crawled back to the bag and groused, "Beautiful! I'm gonna get fried in some dirty, old nightclub, and little Miss Einstein is geeking out over it." She grabbed another balloon and took out another climber, before ducking another lightening strike.

Meanwhile, from the bottom of the stairwell, a plan was coming to form. The strongest of the remaining teens had lain down over the foot of the stairs. That cultist then became the foundation of the next cultist who laid on the steps above him, her feet on his shoulders. The next did the same, as did the other, and another. Each person being supported, not by gravity and traction, as it was thwarted by the ice, but by the sheer weight of one person on top of the other.

Since the stairwell was curved, Marcie could only see what sloped up towards her from the bend ahead, and what she saw confused and disturbed her. A cultist was lying a short distance from the barricade and did nothing else.

What she didn't know was that the last two teens of the church had been backing up as far as the demarcation between the lounge and the dance floor. There, they stopped and took their marks, like sprinters at a track meet, waiting.

Daisy dodged another bolt from Ringleader, and finally understood his tactic. He was providing cover fire for the ladder squad, not simply trying to zap her on the spot, though that could certainly go to his advantage if he did.

She thought about pushing the ladder off the railing, but stopped herself when she realized that with people clambering up it, the ladder was heavier and she would have to stand to get the leverage she would need to move it, making her a sitting duck for Ringleader to electrocute.

So far, by Daisy's count, there were originally seven kids trying to overrun her position. Now there were only three left on her side of things, all on the ladder, but not ascending. The rest were on the floor below, unconscious from icy system shock.

_What were they waiting for? _she thought.

Marcie found herself thinking the same, as she checked the status of her weapon. _Less than half full_, she thought with grim optimism.

"Daisy, I'm running low. Balloon me."

"NOW!" Ringleader roared as the two runners blasted off from their starting place, determined to beat the lightening stroke their master unleashed, to the balcony.

The electrical bolt crashed and tore a wide, burning hole through the protective railing, knocking Daisy back once again, and allowing the first of the surviving ladder squadmates to reach the railing and climb over it.

Daisy blinked back the acrid flash and just barely saw the cultist approach her. She felt for, and recovered, the balloon that had dropped from her hand and, from her prone position, threw the balloon awkwardly at him.

It hit high and off to the side, drenching his shoulders and neck with unforgivable cold. He seized up, eyes rolling in the dim candlelight, and collapsed, just as the second reached the railing's edge and surmounted it.

The runners had reached the base of the stairwell, meanwhile, and, over their tensing church mates, literally ran, scrabbled, clawed, kicked off, and leap-frogged towards Marcie's barricade in a mad rush.

Marcie reacted, taking the shot too quickly and a jet of water flew between the runners. They were stopped short by the barricade, but managed to latch freezing hands onto the spikes and crouched in front of it, effectively turning it into cover from Marcie's low-elevation shots.

Marcie was about to move closer to her barricade and fire down upon them from point-blank range, when she heard Daisy struggling to get up after a cultist walked up to her, followed by her partner.

She swung the rifle around and fired high, freezing the back of the distaff cultist's neck, stopping her in her tracks. Having been bought some time, Daisy rolled over to the open bag, snatched a balloon from it, and threw it in the last ladder man's face.

He choked and sputtered as he shivered, then fell, knocking over a nearby table.

But that had also bought the runners the time _they_ needed to put their plan into action.

They climbed over the melting icicles and draped their bodies over them. The concentrated cold of the barricade left them breathless, but they still stayed on the ice, shivering uncontrollably until, at last, they fainted, still twitching.

The cultists behind them, starting with the bottommost, began to stand up and climb over the human ramp to the barricade, followed by the second, climbing her way up to meet him, and so on. Each successful cultist meeting with the others and forming a human anchorpoint for the next to hold on to.

Marcie ran back to the balcony, gathering her bag and Daisy from the lounge area, and headed towards the back of the balcony.

"C'mon! I found a hallway earlier, leading to the bathrooms on this floor!" yelled Marcie. "Grab a table! We'll use them as a barricade and make our stand here until the police come."

They each grabbed and dragged a table to the mouth of the hallway, and then tipped them on their sides so the edges of the tabletops touched.

"Stand back," Marcie told Daisy.

She threw an Insta-ice capsule against the bottom of the tabletops, where they connected, welding them together in ice. Then she threw one on either side of the tables to fill in the spaces between table and hallway wall.

"Do you think that'll hold them off?" Daisy asked anxiously while she looked out at the balcony's lounge.

"It'll have to," Marcie fretted. "Where the heck is Sheriff Stone?"

Sheriff Stone clapped his hands along with his deputies and laughed like a boy on his birthday, as Joanne stood in the police department's holding cell and hopped on one foot, singing "Yankee Doodle."

"Oh, this is a hoot," he told them with a watering eyes. "I've gotta know where she got these bracelets. I could give one to every member of the family, starting with Janet. I wonder how she'll like taking out the garbage for a while."

A deputy pensively approached Stone and whispered in his ear.

Stone stood up, looking sheepishly. "Crap! I forgot, we have to round up her partner! Okay, men! Move out!"

As Stone and his deputies ran out of the office, they left Joanne still hoping on one foot, singing away.

To Marcie and Daisy's horror, the last of the members of the Cult of Crime clambered over the runners' stunned bodies and finally overran the barricade, clawing for them.

Marcie stood and threw Insta-ice capsules in front of the running mob, chaotically.

Spiky ice islands sprang up in front of the maddened teens, surrounding and slowing them down, cutting them off for the few precious moments Marcie needed to pat herself and fear the result.

"That's the last of my Insta-ice capsules," Marcie reported. "We're down to my water rifle, and that's running dry, and however many balloons are left. This is looking bad."

"So that's how you were able to make that much ice," Daisy said. "But, why didn't you just throw that stuff at them, instead?"

"If I threw that much Insta-ice at them, it could incase and suffocate them. It's not their fault that they're brainwashed."

Daisy hefted a fat, cold balloon in her hand. "Well, I applaud your restraint, but we're stuck up here."

"Hand me a couple of those," Marcie said, unscrewing the rifle's water intake cap.

Marcie took the offered balloons, took her pen from her jacket pocket, and then carefully put a hole in the balloons, draining the water into the rifle's tank. When she was done, she pumped the pressure up and checked the gauges. Enough for two minutes of firing.

She didn't have time to reflect on it, because the teens, finally rested from their assault in the stairwell, jumped and climbed over the icy corral and ran towards Marcie and Daisy, eager for conquest.

"Let 'em have it!" cried Marcie.

A frigid barrage of ice water rifle fire and water balloons struck the attackers dead on. Freezing water splashed on tender necks, soaking through the tops of shirts and blouses, and chilling falling cultists to the bone.

Then all was deafeningly quiet.

Between the shocked souls cluttering the balcony, and the ones littering the lounge, below, there was no one left to challenge them, save one.

Daisy carefully climbed over the last barricade, stepped around comatose cultists and peered out over the ruined railing. Only subdued children were there.

"Hey, Marcie," Daisy said. "That Ringo guy isn't down there. I don't see him."

Marcie gave an exhausted sigh. The battle was won, but this war wasn't over, not while _he_ skulked the shadows of the nightclub. But, still, a win was a win. Now to finish the rescue.

She zipped up her thermal bag, pulled it on her shoulder, and then climbed over the ice and table wall.

"Okay, here's what you'll do," she told Daisy. "At the end of the hall is a window. I saw a fire escape outside of it. Take that down to the alley and wait for the police. Tell the sheriff that Ringleader is still in the building somewhere."

Daisy heard the instructions, but failed to hear what Marcie was going to do in the interim. That was distinctly troubling, because it sounded like the scholar was staying behind to hunt the man down.

"What about you? What are you going to do?"

Marcie walked over to the ladder and straddled the railing, stepping on the upper rungs.

"I'm gonna seriously harsh his mellow," she said to her. Then she disappeared from view as she descended.

The sounds of metal striking something hard rang down the dim corridor of the main emergency exit.

They led a curious Marcie from the bar, past the women's restroom, and carefully back to the junction of the corridor's T-section again, where the banging was the loudest.

Squinting down the hall towards its end, Marcie could just make out a figure squatting in front of the iced-up rear exit, knocking off chunks of ice with what looked like a large, rusty wrench.

Marcie crept back towards the women's restroom and thought hard. Since the sheriff was taking his good, sweet time getting to the hideout, it wasn't going to be long before Ringleader would bash his way to freedom, unless he was distracted or defeated.

She glumly looked at what she had left in her arsenal. A bag of some five cold water balloons and a practically empty water rifle. Not that a full compliment of them would stop him. It would just make him wetter and even angrier.

A thought sparked in her head. It felt desperate, because it was, but it also felt promising. If this worked, it could stop him. Stop him cold.

She tip-toed back to the dance floor. The kids were still sleeping off their system shocks as she strolled quickly past them. On the floor where Daisy had kicked it, was what she came for. The bucket.

Grabbing it, she jogged quietly back to the restroom.

Ringleader swung again at the stubborn ice, cracking away another good chunk. It would have almost been therapeutic, if he wasn't so desperate to get the hell out of there.

The sounds of battle had died down to an unsettling silence a while ago, but he didn't care. His flock served their purpose of, at least, keeping that insufferable busy-body occupied while she tried to rescue her friend. It didn't matter if they caught the ex-cult member or not. It bought him time to make an escape.

With the swag from the most recent heists and break-ins safely stowed in his van, along with a box of Joanne's tainted bracelets, he could move on to another town and start fresh there, with a new crop of kiddies all ready to be brainwashed into obedient little drones. Maybe he'd go to Irvine.

"Chewing your way to freedom as only a rat can, huh, Ringworm?" Marcie called out from her end of the hall.

Ringleader turned, half out of curiousity, and half out of a desire to bury the wrench into her head. He couldn't believe that she'd still dog his heels after all he threw at her.

"What's with you, anyway?" he asked in frustration. "Are you getting paid to cause me grief?"

"If I was, I'd do this for free, after what you did to me."

"Oh, girl, I just scrambled you mind a bit, that's all. Happened to me more than once, I can tell you."

"I like my brain, thank you very much, and I don't appreciate it being washed. Though I'm sure Joanne can attest to as much right now," Marcie said coolly.

"I didn't get the chance to ask, before I reprogram your brain again with this wrench, how did you escape from Joanne? She told me on the phone that she put a new bracelet on you and told you to go play in traffic."

Marcie gave an expression of mock-surprise. "Oh, that? She lied. Or rather, I told her to lie to you. See, she was going to try to brainwash me, but I beat her to the punch. Joanne's my puppet, now, and I have to admit, I like the power. I can see why you did it. After I figured out _how_ you did it. "

'Where's my old lady?" Ringleader growled, both worried and annoyed.

"Oh, she's safe," Marcie told him with a placating wave. "She should be finished spilling the beans about everything you two did, to the sheriff, right about now. I told her to do that, too, in case you were wondering. Now everybody's gonna know your little secret, Ringworm. That you're a Fagin."

Ringleader bristled at that. "Hey, you take that back, girlie! I _love_ my old lady!"

It took Marcie a few seconds to process that.

"No! _Fagin! _From Oliver Twist? The leader of gang of child thieves."

"Oh."

A shower of ice shards landed on Ringleader's back, as a loud metallic boom shook the exit door, badly startling him.

Marcie sighed gratefully. It had to be Stone and the others. The plan to keep him talking to stall him worked.

"I guess that's the sheriff knocking," Marcie said, flippantly. "Aren't you going to answer the door?"

The criminal's mind was running at supercomputer speed, thinking of various ways to get out of here, all either doomed to failure or suicidal in nature.

"Too bad you don't have a hostage," Marcie's voice echoed down the hall, although Ringleader couldn't see her anymore. "It could come in handy."

_A good idea_, he thought, as he dropped his wrench and tore down the hall after her.

He reached the intersection and then stopped. She was gone. She could conceivably hide anywhere long enough that he couldn't find her before the law found him.

For a second he debated with himself on the possibility of grabbing one of the incapacitated teens as a hostage, but thought better of it. Conscious hostages were far better than comatose ones.

Then he heard it, a sneeze from the right. In the direction of the women's bathrooms. He smiled like a predator, and flexed his energized gloves.

He stalked the hall that led to the restrooms and saw that the bathroom door was stuck open about a quarter of the way. She had to be in there.

Coming up to the threshold, he stepped in, pushing the door wide open.

He was immediately struck on the head, and drenched from top to bottom with cool water from the hidden bucket that was balanced on top of the door that was propped partially open by one of Marcie's shoes below.

_Definitely here_, he thought, imagining deliciously horrid ways to pay her back properly for her interference.

Wiping the water from his eyes, he looked into the bathroom, expecting Marcie to be hiding in one of the stalls. Instead, she stood on the other side of the room, across from the doorway, one of her stockinged legs, shoeless, and arms open at her sides in a defensive stance, ready for the attach she knew would come.

Ringleader favored her a wan smile. "Cute."

He raised his hand with a flourish of finality. Its electric aura reflected off of the surrounding porcelain and surviving chrome.

"Not using me as a hostage, then?" she asked.

"Not after that prank. I'll take my chances getting out of here in one piece, right after I make sure you _don't_."

Marcie's eyes followed him, as he reared his arm back, as though he was about to throw a pitch, the sharp blue aura becoming a nimbus of lethal energy around his clawed fingers. From the confined space of the bathroom, even if his Tesla coil glove missed the mark with a direct hit, the widening path of the bolt would still find her, even if she dodged at the last second.

His thrust out, pointing where his destruction would go, and froze, his scream transformed into a pained choke, as every muscle locked into agonizing spasms when his wet hands and body conducted every volt of power from his Tesla coils.

His eyes rolled up white and fell back from the threshold, a mask of shock and unbelieving surprise molded from his face. He crashed to the hallway floor, twitching and stunned, as the bathroom door closed.

Marcie opened the door to look down and grimly judge her handiwork, remembering vaguely how he left her mentally broken against a trash can in an alleyway.

"Tune in, turn on...drop dead," she said to him, as she heard the exit door finally surrender to the police-issue battering ram.

Marcie stood at the mouth of the alleyway where the sheriff's and deputies' cruisers, flanked by a number of ambulances, were parked to provide a cordon to catch Ringleader, if he had managed to break through the frozen door.

The long line of blanket-clad teenagers filed out of the nightclub, like monks on a parade, and she could smell the faint whiff of smelling salts on every one of them that passed her on their way to the EMT's.

_That was hard_, she thought. The deductions, the counter-attacks to the criminal's attacks and reprisals, and the rescue. All of it. She closed her eyes and laid her head back against the brick wall of the adjourning building, resting and thinking.

For every instance of logic, common sense, and innate skill she possessed, she realized, there would come a time when they would not serve her, and dumb, incalculable luck would. If it did.

"Dangerous," she muttered to herself, not noticing Daisy walking towards her, flanked by her recovered sisters.

"What did you say, Marcie?" she asked when she approached.

Hearing Daisy's voice broke Marcie's sobering revelry. She looked at the assemblage of love and gratitude between the siblings and, she had to admit, that it could not have happened if she didn't...meddle.

That was the life of a mystery-solver, she realized. That was the choice and the challenge. Dancing on that swaying tight-rope between "not getting involved" and "getting involved". Between playing it safe, and getting a little dirty doing the right thing.

Too much of one, and she lives a flaccid life under the status quo of small town society. Too much of the other, and she lives an eventfully short life.

She was bolstered, then, when she saw it a sense of balance, much like how she took to chemistry. It was all about the perfect mixture of action and reaction, but this was a formula she would have to figure out for herself, and it may take years to get it right, if she was lucky.

But that was a debate for another time, right now, she was pleased with herself and grateful that things didn't turn out worse than they did.

"I was just thinking out loud," Marcie told her with a weary smile.

"We want to thank you for getting us out of that stupid hippy's cult," Delilah spoke for the rest. "You were crazy brave back there, and we're not going to forget that."

"Don't mention it, guys," Marcie tried to dismiss while blushing. _So_ _this was what it was like to have somebody genuinely like you_, she thought. _It feels really, really good_. "I'm just glad that you and the others are okay."

Marcie and the girls' attention turned to the defeated hippy in handcuffs, being led by a diamond shaped escort of four deputies towards Sheriff Stone's car.

They stopped by the girls when Stone approached Marcie, waiting for any additional orders.

Being that close to Marcie gave Ringleader the bitter impetus to speak his mind one more time before they took him away. He boldly glared at her.

"Okay, man, you got me. Like, I could have been a true pontiff of pillage, controlling larcenous legions from one town to the next, and I would have gotten away with it, too, if you hadn't have harshed my mellow, man."

"I'm not a man, I'm a girl," Marcie rebutted flatly. "Oh, I almost forgot."

She opened her shoulder bag, turned to one of the deputies, not daring to trust Stone to remember, and pulled out her last water balloon, which had become cool in her slender hand.

"Deputy, sir, when you get back to the station, would you put this in a freezer for a few minutes, until it gets _really_ cold, and then throw it at Joanne Barlow's back? It will snap her out of her brainwashing."

The deputy accepted the balloon, and then Marcie turned to Stone, still high from her success, and said, "Okay, Sheriff, take him away."

Stone bristled at his authority being usurped. "Now don't get cocky, there, Millie."

"Marcie," she sighed.

"You may have cracked this case wide open, freed over a dozen brainwashed citizens, and save hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stolen merchandise," Stone chastised. "but _I'm_ sheriff in this town, and don't you forget it."

"I couldn't if I tried," she quipped softly.

Stone turned to Ringleader, holding him by the shoulder and the handcuff chain, and guiding him to the backseat of his car. "Alright, Mr. Hippy Man, you're going to a place where the only roaches you'll see are crawling up the walls."

Daisy watched the sheriff's car drive away, and leaned over to say to Marcie, "That guy is _weird_."

"Who? Ringleader, or the sheriff?"

"Yes." That got a laugh from the two.

One that was long in coming.


	10. Epilogue

Epilogue~

"It looks like they finally got that hippy," Winslow called out from his chair in the living room.

He lowered his daily paper when he heard his daughter coming down the stairs, and noticed her wearing a pair of coveralls with a set of goggles sitting high on her head.

"What's with that get-up, Marcie?" he asked, as she walked into the living room.

Marcie looked down at her ensemble, smoothing the fabric and preening self-consciously. "Well, I'm going out with a friend for a little while."

"Anyone I know?"

"Uh, not really, Dad. It's, uh, Daisy Blake."

His eyebrows rose in honest surprise. "Oh, Barty Blake's little girl. I didn't know you two had met."

Marcie was feeling uncomfortable having such a long dissertation about the new friend in her life, knowing that others knew she had so few.

"Yeah. I just didn't want to make a federal case about it, that's all," she said under her breath.

"I understand. Anyway, I was saying that the sheriff caught that clown, Ringleader."

"I thought he was a hippy," Marcie joked. "Yeah, I know. They caught him a few days ago at that abandoned dance club, and I, for one, am happy he's going away for a good long time."

"Same here," Winslow agreed. "So how long are you going to be out?"

"Not too long. A few hours."

Winslow raised his paper to face level to continue reading, expecting the conversation to be over after he told her, "All right, Marcie. Call me if anything comes up," but Marcie didn't leave the room yet.

"What's wrong?" her father asked her, bringing the paper down again.

Marcie looked at her father with penitent eyes, trying to find the right way to say what felt she had to say.

"Dad, I'm sorry about what happened at the staff meeting the other day. You work hard to keep this family together and a roof over our heads. I...wasn't myself that day. I had no right to browbeat you about that."

Winslow looked at Marcie with pleasant shock. She sounded so mature, just then. Not many teenagers these days would have made such an admission to a parent.

Not that it was even necessary, he had put it out of his mind so long ago, that it hadn't even concerned him after that day. But now she made it an issue to address, and he would honor her by talking it out.

"Marcie, you have nothing to apologize for," he told her, holding her hand to support his words. "You were worried about me. That's your right as a daughter. I would be more worried if you didn't think at all about my welfare."

Marcie said nothing, and just kept her eyes averted.

Winslow continued. "As a young woman, I can only imagine how hard it must be for you not having your mother around, but I want you to know that if she were here with us right now, she'd never be more prouder of how you've grown up. Never stop caring, Marcie, it's the best part of you."

Without preamble, Marcie hugged her father, lest the emotions that swelled inside overwhelm her.

"I love you, Dad."

"I love you, too, Marcie."

From outside, a car horn bleated, taking attention away from each other. Marcie broke the hold, straightened her goggles, then walked to the door.

"That's her. I gotta run, Dad. I'll see you later."

Winslow raised a hand to halt her. "Wait. What are you two going to be doing, out there?"

"Dumpster diving," she confessed. "She going to show me the ropes. If I get good enough, imagine the things I could find on the cheap, especially at places like Creationex."

Winslow perked up when he heard his favorite word. "Cheap, huh? Well, I guess you _are_ a chip off the old block, after all. Take care."

"Wish me luck!"

And with that, she happily left her white two-story home with the blue trim, and with the acceleration of Daisy's sports car, stepped into the wild and woolly world of friendships.

The palatial home was purchased months before his arrival. It sat, perched on one of the woodland hills that overlooked the town and the surrounding Pacific, sharing wide, cultivated space with the homes of other celebrities, or industrial magnates, or simply, the wealthy.

Mr. Greenman, his back to the dinner party he was hosting, took in the coastal vistas that Crystal Cove was blessed with, through one of the panoramic windows of his estate.

"Crystal Cove. The Sunniest Place on Earth," he quietly mused to himself. "Well, the sunnier the place...the deeper the shadows."

A man in a business suit broke off from the mingling crowds and walked up to Greenman.

"As your financial advisor, I have to say, Greenman, I am truly amazed at how large your fortune has grown. And all of it in gold!" the man said jovially. "What are you planning to do? Corner the gold market?"

The master of the house turned to the advisor. "As an advisor, I shouldn't have to tell you that it's all about patience and discipline. However, a little divine intervention doesn't hurt, either."

The advisor shook his head in understanding. "Mmm, charitable deductions. Right."

Greenman chuckled at the man's single-minded concern for money, then he stole a glance at the darkening sunset, and finished his drink. It was time.

"Please excuse me, Mr. Cavanaugh. I have to attend to a bit of business in my office."

"Sure thing. Don't buy any wooden stocks," Cavanaugh joked, then added seriously, "No really, don't buy any lumber stocks, right now, it's _really_ dicey."

Ignoring the man, Greenman walked quietly away, and soon entered and locked himself into his spacious office.

While other offices might have _wanted_ a warm, wooden look to them, his office was nothing less than a sylvan setting, looking more grown than built, complete with a mini-waterfall and stream, and appointed with beautifully carved furniture and walls, all aged to a veneer of dark perfection.

He walked over to his massive oaken desk and touched a hidden switch there, opening a door hidden behind a tapestry-draped wall.

Stepping inside, he walked to a small chamber, that ended in an oak and ivy shrine and alter.

On the alter, a trio of gold-inlayed wooden statues stood above a silver bowl of pure spring water.

Kneeling on a silk pillow at the base of the alter, Greenman muttered prayers that were considered ancient even from _their_ bygone age, communing through the effigies of his three gods, asking them for good fortune.

"Your truest servant calls to you," he said reverently. "I have followed the lines that you have traced in the earth with your divinity, and they have led me here. Bless the endeavors that I do in your sacred names, with good fortune, in the coming days."

A green, otherworldly light illuminated the alter from an unseen source, and incredibly, the heads of the three idols became animated and spoke in chorus.

"Goodly fortune will be yours, Last of the True Druids." they said simultaneously.

"Bless you, great masters. Ble-"

The idols cut him off suddenly, their unison voice heavy with portent.

"But be wary of the alchemist. Although her hand shall make a way for you, that same hand may come to close _upon_ you. Be wary..."

As the supernatural light faded from the statutes, once more making them inert, Greenman sat on his knees, confused by the omen. Alchemists? In this day and age? One that will help his cause, or possibly hinder it?

"_Her?_" the Druid finally asked himself, not even he believing how strongly the hand of Fortune was guiding everything.

To be continued...


End file.
